Prioritize your most profitable prospects with predictive datapoints like Credit Score Proxy

Imagine this: You’re a brand with a list of leads, but no real way to tell which ones are actually in a financial position to become high-value customers. So you treat everyone the same. That means wasted spend, low conversion rates, and missed opportunities when your best reps chase the wrong people—or when a strong prospect drops out late in the funnel due to credit issues.

Now imagine you could suppress just the bottom 10%—the folks least likely to convert, based on financial behavior and purchasing power—without pulling a single credit score.

That’s where Credit Score Proxy comes in.

So what is Credit Score Proxy?

Credit Score Proxy is a relative marketing value ranking. It segments 120 million U.S. households into 12 rank-ordered categories (A1 to E3), using behavioral and lifestyle data—like age, property characteristics, aggregate credit indicators, and more (we also offer a variant of this datapoint in which the 12 categories are collapsed to 5 more-manageable categories).

It can function as a predictive proxy for financial reliability, offering many of the same benefits as a credit score for marketers, without using actual sensitive credit data or requiring a credit pull.

This table shows how Credit Score Proxy tiers typically align with traditional credit score ranges (in the risk score column) but please note: these are illustrative estimates, not actual credit scores. Credit Score Proxy doesn’t use credit data or generate credit scores; these risk scores are included to help marketers understand how each tier relates to familiar financial benchmarks.

Credit Score Proxy Rank	Illustrative Credit Score Range	% of Households in FIG*	Marketing Profitability
A1	760	17%	Best
A2	740	10%	Best
B1	725	10%	Above average
B2	710	11%	Above average
C1	690	11%	Average
C2	675	11%	Average
D1	660	10%	Below average
D2	650	4%	Below average
D3	640	4%	Below average
E1	625	4%	Poor
E2	610	4%	Poor
E3	590	4%	Poor

* Note on distribution: While the above table reflects approximate national distributions represented in FIG, the Faraday Identity Graph (FIG) shows a slight overrepresentation of higher-credit-score households and an underrepresentation of low-credit or underbanked individuals. This means your enriched dataset may lean more toward high-value prospects—helpful when prioritizing outreach, but worth keeping in mind for broad reach strategies.

So how should you think about using Credit Score Proxy in practice?

What Credit Score Proxy isn’t

It’s easy to think of Credit Score Proxy as essentially a predictive credit proxy—and that’s not entirely wrong. But it’s also not quite right.

Unlike FICO or other regulated credit scores, Credit Score Proxy wasn’t built for lenders or compliance-heavy decisions. It’s designed for marketers who want to prioritize outreach based on a household’s likely value—not just financial risk.

It uses lifestyle, demographic, and inferred financial behavior to segment households by marketing profitability. No tradeline data, no credit bureau pulls—just smart signals modeled for outreach.

In short: Credit Score Proxy is inspired by credit scores, but optimized for marketing. It’s a broader, privacy-safe alternative that aligns with overall consumer value, not just credit risk.

How Credit Score Proxy fits into Faraday

Faraday is a modern data platform that helps consumer brands grow by enriching their first-party records with verified identity data, curated consumer datapoints, and custom AI-powered predictions. At the heart of this is the Faraday Identity Graph (FIG), our rich database that contains 1500+ unique datapoints on over 240 million U.S. adults and their households. This data is prediction ready, privacy safe, and sourced from some of the best providers in the industry.

We use the FIG to enrich your customer data by appending new information, giving you a deeper understanding of your audience and how best to engage with them. These enriched datapoints generally take three forms:

• Verified identity data — Fill in the blanks: name, email, phone, address. These verified identities form the foundation of every enriched record.
  Consumer datapoints — Curated, industry-relevant traits like income, homeownership, household size, or age—plus prebuilt predictive scores such as likelihood to buy luxury goods or subscribe to streaming services. These datapoints make segmentation, targeting, and prioritization easy—even before layering on custom predictions.
• Custom predictions — AI-powered scores trained on your historical outcomes, like Likelihood to Buy, Best Product Recommendation, or Persona assignment. Built specifically for your brand, these models use your first-party data alongside the 1,500+ behavioral datapoints in the FIG. Unlike off-the-shelf predictive insights, they’re tailored to your goals and go-to-market motion.

Credit Score Proxy is a textbook example of a prebuilt predictive consumer datapoint, and like any other datapoint from the FIG, it’s added as a new column to your dataset—ready to drive smarter targeting, prioritization, and ROI.

With Credit Score Proxy in place, you can:

• Build audiences by selecting only the highest-value tiers
• Filter out low-likelihood individuals for cost-efficient targeting
• Route leads or assign reps based on expected value

It’s one of the fastest ways to improve performance without adding complexity—and without pulling credit.

Credit Score Proxy in action

For example, here’s how a leading direct-to-consumer home services brand used Credit Score Proxy to sharpen its acquisition funnel.

• At the lead purchase stage, they paired Credit Score Proxy with a custom predictive score to reject low-quality leads in real time—saving over $500,000 in wasted spend within five months.
• At the appointment stage, they used Credit Score Proxy tiers to flag households likely to fail credit checks, which were failing about 75% of the time in lower tiers. By suppressing these leads, they freed up their reps to focus on high-value prospects.

The result: fewer wasted appointments, lower acquisition costs, and a more efficient sales funnel overall.

Why it matters to you

Many of our clients need a way to infer financial standing without crossing regulatory lines. Credit Score Proxy gives you a privacy-friendly path to do just that—especially useful in industries like:

• Home services
• Solar and energy
• Education
• Debt settlement
• Financial products (without lending)

It’s one of the most effective ways to suppress low-value outreach and drive higher ROI on every campaign.

Want to learn how Credit Score Proxy works inside your workflow? Let’s talk.