SoFi Technologies, Inc. (SoFi), a prominent player among America’s new-generation digital financial platforms, has been leveraging its highly data-driven credit decisioning system and product design oriented around the entire user lifecycle to continuously deliver more efficient, transparent, and affordable financial solutions to millions of its members. As an innovative institution with a business scope spanning student loans, personal loans, housing finance, and a comprehensive digital financial platform, SoFi has achieved impressive results in an increasingly competitive FinTech environment. According to data from Nasdaq, in Q1 2025, SoFi’s net sales rose by 20% year-on-year, while its net profit surged by 217%. Its efficient and diversified cost structure, as well as its innovative technology application system, are the core drivers behind this remarkable growth.
The U.S. financial system is undergoing a critical transformation, shifting from prioritizing sheer scale expansion to emphasizing both quality and stability. On the one hand, the rapid advancement of digitalization and FinTech has significantly lowered barriers to credit access, extending the reach of student loans and personal credit to a broader demographic of young and emerging populations. On the other hand, shifts in the macroeconomic interest rate environment, evolving employment structures, and persistent tightening of regulatory requirements have collectively posed unprecedented challenges to financial institutions’ risk identification capabilities, product governance standards, and the robustness of their decision-making systems.
Against this industry backdrop, SoFi is driving innovation and reform in risk management, focusing on developing more stable and superior approval logic to navigate uncertain financial risks, thereby restructuring its credit decisioning system. This ambitious undertaking has culminated in the “NextGen Strategy”. Yihan Shi, the Senior Data Scientist leading this project, graduated from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, and holds a Master’s degree in Business Analytics, possessing extensive experience in financial data analysis and project implementation. Since joining SoFi, she has consistently leveraged financial business data analysis in conjunction with the company’s practical business strategies to drive the reform and optimization process of the company’s credit business system.
Yihan Shi
Yihan Shi informed the reporter that SoFi has always prioritized the quality of its member services and maintained a leading position in the highly competitive FinTech market through continuous product innovation. To better adapt to the latest market developments and address issues that gradually emerged during business expansion, such as high fitting risk, substantial explanation costs, and sluggish response to economic cycle changes, Yihan Shi led and initiated the “NextGen Strategy” project.
It is reported that Yihan Shi has replaced some of the more volatile cash flow indicators with the Debt-to-Income ratio (DTI) as a core dimension for assessing borrowers’ long-term solvency, thereby mitigating the risk of model failure under macroeconomic environmental changes at the source. Concurrently, she introduced differentiated risk policies based on education level. Specifically, Yihan Shi designed distinct risk stratification matrices tailored to the differences in income expectations and risk structures between undergraduates and graduate students, which include differentiated judgment logic and a consistent high-risk handling pathway for low-score segments. Furthermore, she innovated the project methodology by articulating the design principle of “reverting from complex and volatile temporary signals to explainable, robust core judgment logic”. She led the team to reconstruct global exclusion rules and audit trails, ensuring that every approval or rejection decision possesses clear, traceable logical grounds. This approach successfully addresses and meets increasingly stringent compliance and regulatory requirements.
Now, the “NextGen Strategy” project has been officially documented and integrated into SoFi’s business systems, becoming one of SoFi’s innovative strategies for credit approval and governance. According to internal assessments and feedback from SoFi, the new system has significantly reduced issues of inconsistent or ambiguous approval outcomes caused by income fluctuations or abnormal short-term cash flow. Inter-departmental explanation costs have been effectively lowered, improving the efficiency of internal audits and external regulatory communications. The business team noted that the new strategy has reduced reliance on manual reviews and ad-hoc exception handling, leading to an approximate 30% increase in overall approval process efficiency. Moreover, the innovative stratification and differentiated policy design enable the approval process to better align with borrowers’ long-term risk profiles while maintaining efficiency, thereby enhancing the robustness of overall approval decisions. Yihan Shi commented, “The ‘NextGen Strategy’ project is not a simple model upgrade, but rather a fundamental restructuring of the underlying approval logic. It allows us to more clearly understand why an application is approved and why it is rejected, especially when facing uncertainty.”
The value of the “NextGen Strategy” project extends beyond merely enhancing SoFi’s internal approval efficiency and robustness. More importantly, it offers a replicable credit governance framework for the FinTech industry. Specifically, it demonstrates how, in an increasingly complex credit environment, simplifying core judgment logic and strengthening explainability and audit capabilities can enhance a system’s adaptability to economic cycles and regulatory changes. This also provides SoFi’s management with a clearer, more robust governance foundation for subsequent strategy iterations and the introduction of new products. Relevant data analytics experts point out that approval system upgrades like SoFi’s represent a significant shift for FinTech companies from “model-driven growth” to “governance-supported growth”. This transformation holds positive implications for safeguarding financial consumer rights, mitigating systemic risk, and maintaining long-term stability in the credit market.
As the financial landscape continues to evolve, SoFi states it will continue to invest resources in risk management and credit decisioning systems. Through the innovative team led by Senior Data Scientist Yihan Shi, the company will persistently reform its business strategies with a data-driven and robustness-oriented approach, aiming to foster a better balance between sustainable growth and risk control in financial services. The “NextGen Strategy” is viewed as an integral part of this long-term vision, and it also offers a tangible example for the industry on how to construct a more resilient credit system in an uncertain era.
