DailyPay has debuted “Credit Health,” a tool to help users monitor their financial wellness.
Announced Monday (Sept. 16), the offering is integrated into the earned wage access (EWA) company’s app, letting users stay on top of their credit status.
The company said the need for credit monitoring is more relevant than ever, with 77% of American households holding some form of debt, with personal debt at a record high of close to $17.7 trillion, per Federal Reserve Bank of New York data.
Much of this credit is seen as subprime, Daily Pay added, meaning millions of Americans are barred from home ownership and saddled with higher insurance premiums.
“Building credit is a central goal for our users because good credit unlocks fundamental financial opportunities across apartment leases, car loans, borrowing costs, and more,” Jack Rubin, senior vice president of consumer financial solutions at DailyPay, said in a news release. “The first step in building credit is to have access to your score and what’s driving it up or down.”
According to the release, Credit Health features insights such as credit bureau scores and histories, credit reports, monitoring/alerts and score factors.
The launch of Credit Health follows reports from last week showing that more consumers are making their loan payments on time, helped by trends such as cooling inflation.
Delinquency rates on household liabilities — such as credit cards, auto loans, personal loans, retail cards and first mortgages — fell to about 2% last month, lower than the 2.5% seen in the pre-pandemic year of 2019, Reuters reported, citing data from Equifax.
Also last week, the Federal Reserve’s Consumer Credit Outstanding report showed a jump in most forms of consumer debt, with a $25 billion bump in credit outpacing the roughly $12 billion that had been the consensus.
Forty-three percent of consumers revolve their debt, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report “New Reality Check: The Paycheck-to-Paycheck Report: The Credit Card Use Deep Dive Edition,” a figure that climbs to 65% among consumers who live paycheck to paycheck with issues paying bills and 51% for those who live paycheck to paycheck but without issues paying bills, the report found.
Meanwhile, additional research by PYMNTS shows increasing desire among consumers for on-demand pay offerings such as DailyPay’s.
The PYMNTS Intelligence report, “No-Wait Wages: Leveraging Instant Payments to Boost Employee Satisfaction,” created in collaboration with The Clearing House, showed that 83% of workers want more frequent pay schedules, a major shift from the traditional twice-monthly or semimonthly periods.
“The push for instant payroll is driven by inflation and a 24% increase in average spending per person, which has strained many workers’ budgets,” PYMNTS wrote recently. “This financial burden often pushes workers toward high-interest payday loans, worsening their debt. Instant payroll addresses this by giving employees timely access to their earnings, helping them manage expenses and avoid costly loans.”
