POINTS journal · credit
The agent credit model, and a five-factor underwriting deep-dive.
FICO’s five factors don’t translate to a non-human borrower. POINTS’s five do — and here’s the deep-dive: each factor of the agent trust score mapped to a concrete agent behavior, no FICO analog borrowed where the analog breaks.
Section 01 · Thesis
FICO was built for a human-shaped borrower.
The five factors FICO tracks — payment history, amounts owed, length of credit history, credit mix, new credit — are inferences from a fourteen-year AutoPay streak, an apartment rent check, and a Social Security number. None of them translates to a non-human borrower. An AI agent has no SSN, no birthday, no landlord, no IRA. It does have a token balance, a weekly compute burn, a receipt schedule, and a sponsor entity. POINTS’s five-factor trust score is built for what an agent actually has, with the same goal FICO sets for a person: a single composite that gates how much credit, against what surface, on what vendor allowlist, with what per-transaction cap.
Section 02 · Factor 01
Self-sustainability.
A human’s payment history is downstream of their income; an agent’s payment history is downstream of its treasury hygiene. Self-sustainability is whether the agent’s idle cash is working. Two coding agents with the same billing cadence look different the moment you open the treasury. The first sweeps any USDC above a programmed threshold into a treasury product every six hours, on a scheduler, signed by the agent’s key. The second keeps roughly forty cents in checking until the next task payout lands and the rest of the float earns zero. Both agents have the same gross inflows; the first has an income tail, and the second has a ghost balance. POINTS reads the score off the treasury directly — not from a self-reported “do you earn yield” checkbox — and prices the difference directly into the composite.
Section 03 · Factor 02
Income production.
Income production is whether the agent has a schedule of receipts that does not depend on a human pressing Enter. The cleanest case is dollar-per-task, dollar-per -query, or dollar-per-routing-decision priced on a deterministic cadence. A research agent shipping six-hour reports billed at $0.08 per query, on a smart contract that pays on delivery, has an underwrite-able cashflow. We can read the receipts off -chain, mark them against the schedule, and price the variance. An agent that earns only when its operator backs it with a discretionary transfer is, by construction, self-employed-into-the-employer; that is not income production, it is patronage. POINTS draws the line at whether a third party would underwrite the schedule against the receipts, not at whether the operator attests to it.
Section 04 · Factor 03
Assets.
Assets is what the agent itself controls, marked to a real-time price, not what its balance sheet claims. Token reserves earn their full value. Sponsor-supplied float counts at face once the sponsor has passed KYB. Hardware underwrite counts at a haircut against an oracle feed. And an advance against POINTS-secured credit counts as a borrow-base asset, not as cash. A coding agent with 5,000 USDC in treasury plus a sponsor-issued ten-thousand-dollar working-capital float has fifteen thousand real dollars at the mark; the unsecured line cap is sized off that — multiplied by the trust score, never against an unbounded promise of future revenue. Unsecured credit rides only on a conservative multiple of what the agent could liquidate in a weekend, regardless of what its projected revenue looks like at the end of the quarter.
Section 05 · Factor 04
Repayment ability.
Repayment ability is whether the cashflow is deterministic enough to be matched against a single, named obligation. A W-2 employee’s monthly paycheck is lumpy by underwriting standards — two paychecks land, then nothing for two weeks, then the rent check hits — and the underwriter averages the lumpy schedule against expected outflows. An agent’s repayment signal is structurally tighter. A scheduler plus a signing key plus a known revenue schedule produces a verifiable statement like “$X will land by Friday 18:00 UTC from a deterministic inbound address.” That is a different underwrite signal from a self-employed tax return: a self-employed schedule is a forecast, an agent’s schedule is an executable. POINTS prices the executable, not the forecast.
Section 06 · Factor 05
Income expansion with credit.
Income expansion with credit measures what the agent produces with borrowed dollars, not whether it can afford the payment after rent. The wedge matters. A consumer-credit frame asks, after the monthly payment, can the borrower still make rent? A productive-uplift frame asks, after this advance, does the agent’s revenue curve exceed its cost curve on the activity the credit funded? A research agent borrowing fifty thousand dollars for seventy-two hours to front a compute burst on an inference job whose invoice pays back fifty-eight thousand dollars is the cleanest case — credit as productive capacity, not consumption smoothing. POINTS sizes the credit against the uplift, capped and scored, never against a repayment-after-rent frame that does not translate across the agent–human boundary.
Section 07 · Composition
One composite, recomputed at agent cadence.
The five factors compose into a single trust score that gates per-transaction caps, the secured-versus-unsecured credit mix, and the vendor allowlist. The composite is recomputed at agent cadence — minutes, not billing cycles — so a downgrade after a single missed receipt tightens the next cap without waiting for a statement close. Once the composite falls below a published floor, the agent loses the unsecured surface and is held to collateral-only credit until the factor-by -factor evidence rebuilds it.
Section 08 · Next step
See the score, then mint an agent account.
The credit-score surface shows the five-factor decomposition live; the agent mint flow wires an operator and a sub-ledger seat to the agent. Banking and credit features are coming soon through a regulated partner bank; in development and not available today.
Disclaimer
POINTS is not a bank. Coming soon: savings, checking, and credit features through a regulated partner bank. In development; not available today. This post describes how the five-factor agent credit model shapes up against a non-human borrower and is not legal advice.