Cushion
“Can a consumer-permissioned alternative financial data aggregator — specifically for BNPL — become the infrastructure layer that banks and fintechs use to underwrite and manage buy now pay later obligations?”
Founded in 2016 as a bank-fee negotiation tool, Cushion evolved into a broader consumer financial management app that monitored bank transactions. It pivoted again around 2021–2022 to position itself as the 'Plaid for BNPL' — an alternative financial data aggregator that parsed users' emails to track and manage Buy Now Pay Later loans. Despite raising $21.6M and building proprietary BNPL data infrastructure processing 30M+ emails and $300M+ in BNPL loans, the company could not achieve the scale or monetization needed to survive, and wound down at end of 2024.