After launching its beta in February 2015, Happy Mango is currently helping the $9 million Neighborhood Trust Federal Credit Union and a community bank, both based in New York City, to improve the efficiency and accuracy of their underwriting. Financial institutions will direct loan applicants to start a Happy Mango profile and Happy Mango will provide credit reports for free. Eventually the goal is to have financial institutions pay to pull Happy Mango-generated credit reports in order to make lending decisions.

“Every month I can get a report on how many [borrowers] have defaulted, but it doesn't tell me anything about whether the borrowers do have cash flow, whether they have a job, what industries they work in,” Hao said. “That level of information did not exist.”

Other personal finance tools aggregate banking and credit card information to help consumers understand where their money goes. Happy Mango applies that aggregation technology to pull in financial information with the user's consent and helps lenders make credit assessments based on information not found in a credit report.

Other platforms tend to focus on day-to-day transactions, while Hao said Happy Mango, which is a free service, focuses on the bigger financial picture. Consumers who carefully manage their cash flow but don't have an established credit history are most likely to benefit from Happy Mango.

“If you're really not good at managing your finances, our assessment is going to show that,” she said.

Happy Mango allows users to submit testimonials about their character. Positive feedback provides 10% of a score, which is on a scale of 0 to 100. They also assess credit risk based on gaining access to a user's bank accounts, with permission, and viewing the accounts' saving and spending, and income and spending habits.

Hao hopes this type of credit assessment will appeal to millennials and the underbanked and even divorced people whose credit has been destroyed by an ex-spouse.

“Traditional credit stores are a proxy for trustworthiness and a weak linkage,” Hao said. “Instead, culling savings and spending date and letting your friends weigh in on your reliability makes the process more personal. This is a movement to humanize credit scores.”