Case study · BFSI · Credit decisioning
From zero to 5,000 credit cards a month.
How CPG turned routine field verification into a real-time credit-decisioning engine for Citibank — and built a card business across South India from a standing start.
Executive summary
A card business with no way to judge its applicants.
Citibank had a credit card business to build and no reliable way to evaluate applicants at scale. "Alternative data" is a buzzword today — CPG was doing it years ago, turning standard field-verification visits into a real-time intelligence operation that scored every applicant on employment, financial health and fraud risk the moment the agent left the door. Within months, Citibank went from zero to 5,000 cards issued per month, and the same platform later scaled to three million telecom connections across the region.
The challenge
Verification proved an applicant existed. Nothing more.
In a market where traditional credit data was thin or unreliable, confirming an address, a photo and a signature said nothing about whether an applicant was a good credit risk, a fraud risk, or a customer worth keeping.
- Approving applicants with too little context — and carrying the financial exposure
- Rejecting or under-serving applicants who were genuinely creditworthy
- No early-warning system to flag potentially fraudulent applications
The CPG approach
Turn every field visit into a credit decision.
CPG already ran field-verification teams across South India. We saw those visits for what they were — an underused intelligence channel — and built a structured assessment framework and a proprietary app to capture, score and transmit the data instantly.
- Profession and type of employment
- Education level
- Tenure of employment or business ownership
- Industry of employment or business
- Social-status indicators
- Relationship between applicant and end user
- Nature and legal status of the entity
- Number of employees
- Age of the business
- Condition of office premises
- Income-tax returns checked against stated financials
- Evidence of genuine business need
Each data point fed a proprietary rating model. The resulting score gave Citibank's credit and operations teams a clear signal for every applicant — set a credit limit, require a deposit, approve, reject, or flag as high-risk. Decisioning moved from binary to nuanced: serve more customers confidently, while protecting against fraud and exposure.
The app ran on handheld devices carried by field agents. Reports and scores reached Citibank the moment a visit ended — no batch delay, no paper trail to reconcile. The bank could decide the same day the visit happened.
The results
Intelligence at the point of origination — at scale.
Why it worked
Three things, rarely combined.
Field presence at scale
The operational infrastructure to run structured visits across an entire region — consistently, at volume.
Proprietary scoring
Raw observations transformed into a scored, actionable output that slotted straight into the bank's decisioning.
Speed
Handheld capture and real-time transmission compressed the origination cycle — diligence without the wait.
"CPG didn't just verify our applicants — they gave us a way to truly understand them. We went from no card business in the region to issuing thousands of cards a month. That doesn't happen without a partner who can execute at that level."
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