Sangarsh Nigam and the story a credit score leaves out

Sangarsh Nigam remembers a meeting that needed a bigger room. On September 11, 2001, his American Express risk management team was supposed to meet at Windows on the World, at the top of the North Tower in Manhattan. The meeting moved to a hotel in Brooklyn. Twenty-five years later, he would return to that ordinary administrative decision when writing about leadership.

He recalled watching the second plane hit from the sidewalk. His parents were visiting from India. With phone networks down, he could not reach them or his wife for eight hours. He hitchhiked home. Work resumed remotely the next day, followed by almost a year in Parsippany, New Jersey, while American Express rebuilt its downtown operations.

The people he singled out were Ken Chenault, Ed Gilligan and Steve Squeri. What stayed with him was their “steadiness and care.” His reflection put the emphasis on how they treated people, and on returning to work together. It is a personal recollection from someone whose professional life has been devoted to assessing risk. In this instance, the decisive variable had been room capacity.

A credit officer’s unfinished question

Nigam went on to become senior vice president and chief credit officer for Global Commercial Payments at American Express. His responsibilities covered commercial cards, loans, working capital and merchant financing. That range put him close to several ways businesses borrow and pay. A business could appear through its card activity, through its financing needs, or through the information it supplied when seeking credit.

His remit extended beyond individual lending decisions. He served as a voting member of the company’s Institutional Risk Management Committee and represented the commercial business in dealings with the Federal Reserve, FDIC and OCC. Credit sat alongside operational, market, fraud, liquidity and reputational risks. The background matters because the company he later founded addresses several of those concerns together.

Nigam has given a direct account of where bluCognition came from. While working as a chief credit officer at Amex, he saw a need to modernize small business and commercial risk assessment using banking transaction data. He argued that this information was more current and reliable than the financial statements lenders were using. The founder’s question grew out of the credit officer’s work: what could a lender understand if it looked more closely at the transactions?

That is an unusually practical starting point for a technology business. There is no need to imagine a revelation over a whiteboard. His explanation begins with a familiar professional problem and a proposed improvement to the evidence. The ambition is substantial, but its first unit of attention is modest: a banking record.

The bank statement gets a speaking part

The resulting products give that record a more useful vocabulary. bluSense converts bank statements into standardized information and classifies the transactions. FraudLens looks for document tampering. Together, they address two different questions a lender must ask: what does this information reveal about a borrower, and can the document carrying it be trusted?

At FinovateSpring in May 2023, Nigam presented the products with Shirey Seigworth. The company described more than 50 transaction categories and more than 30 analytical features. Those figures belong to that presentation, rather than serving as a running count of today’s product. They show the level at which his proposal had become concrete: conversion, classification, analysis and fraud checks, arranged for use by lenders.

There is something pleasingly unglamorous about the demonstration’s subject. A bank statement rarely gets invited to be interesting. It arrives with dates, descriptions and amounts, and generally expects the reader to do the hard work. Nigam’s business takes that hard work seriously enough to make a product of it.

The presentation also placed him in a different professional setting. The former credit executive was now explaining his own company’s tools to a financial technology audience. His earlier experience supplied the problem; the demonstration required an answer that could be shown. For a founder selling to lenders, that connection between professional familiarity and a working product is central to the story.

An answer with its workings attached

One detail in Nigam’s description deserves attention: reason codes. He explained that bluCognition supplies them alongside its scores, so they can be used in deciding borrower applications. In a short account that also mentions transaction categorization, income statements and fraud detection, he made room for the explanation accompanying a result.

The distinction has a practical consequence. A score compresses information. A reason gives the person using it something to examine. Nigam’s choice to mention both suggests where he wants the product to sit in a lending workflow: close to the decision, with information that helps the lender understand what produced it. The point follows from the product design he described, rather than requiring a claim that software can make judgment unnecessary.

He has also described banking data as useful for checks on a business’s identity, including its physical presence and beneficial ownership. His account connects credit assessment with the work of establishing who a lender is dealing with. The proposed value lies in drawing several usable observations from records a borrower can provide.

For the reader who has never underwritten a commercial loan, this is the part of his career worth pausing over. The founder is asking for more attention to the evidence beneath an application. His tools organize that attention. Whether the outcome is approval, a further question or a closer review remains part of the lender’s task.

Two histories, one borrower

On February 3, 2025, bluCognition and the Small Business Financial Exchange announced a partnership. The plan joined bluCognition’s analysis of banking transactions with SBFE’s credit payment performance data. SBFE said its exchange included information from more than 140 members, including the ten largest commercial banks.

The pairing gives Nigam’s original idea another dimension. A transaction record and a credit payment record describe different parts of a business’s financial activity. Bringing them together is intended to help lenders assess a borrower with more context. In the announcement, Nigam emphasized integrating payment performance with insights from banking transactions in real time.

The agreement was framed as complementing SBFE’s existing credit bureau partnerships. It also included an aim to expand SBFE membership among U.S. lending institutions. This was a move into an established network of commercial credit information, with its existing relationships and uses. The work of improving a lending decision would involve cooperation as well as software.

For Nigam, it continued a line of work that began inside a large financial institution. He had identified a gap in the information available for assessing businesses. His company had developed tools to process additional evidence. The partnership connected those tools with another body of records. Each step widened the picture he wanted a lender to see.

The small business behind the application

Nigam’s public explanation of the company’s purpose has become more personal than a list of features. He has written about entrepreneurs meeting payroll, serving customers and sustaining their communities. His stated aim is fairer lending for small businesses whose operations may be poorly represented by older credit models. That is his aspiration for the work, rather than a measured claim about every decision made with the products.

This is also where his career acquires a useful symmetry. At American Express, he held responsibility for commercial credit products. At bluCognition, he runs a business serving organizations that make credit decisions. He has moved from overseeing risk within an institution to building tools that other institutions can use. The borrower remains at the far end of both jobs.

The ambition is easy to express and harder to fulfill. A small business needs to be understood on terms that reflect how it operates. Nigam’s proposed route is through recent transactions, payment behavior and usable explanations. The technology has to carry that information into the lender’s ordinary work. A fine slogan would have a much easier schedule.

His own account keeps returning to that relationship between evidence and opportunity. Better information is meant to help a lender recognize what is happening inside a business. For an entrepreneur seeking capital, being seen accurately can matter as much as being seen quickly. That is the human stake Nigam places behind the product.

Another kind of capital

In May 2025, Alt Carbon named Nigam among the angel investors participating in its seed financing. The carbon removal company announced a $12 million round led by Lachy Groom, with participation from existing investor Shastra VC and other angels. Nigam’s individual investment amount was not part of the announcement.

The investment adds a separate chapter to his public career. Alt Carbon described work spanning agricultural infrastructure, geochemical models, monitoring and carbon removal in the Global South. Nigam appeared in that story as an investor, alongside founders and other individual backers. His work with capital had acquired another setting beyond commercial lending.

Back at bluCognition, the question remains close to the one he identified at Amex: how much can a lender learn from the financial activity already taking place? His answer has taken the form of products, a public demonstration and a data partnership. It is a founder’s career built around improving the view from the credit desk.

The personal recollection about September 11 sits beside that professional story without neatly explaining it. It tells us what Nigam remembers about people entrusted with responsibility: their steadiness, their care and their willingness to keep working together. His lending work asks for careful attention to businesses. His account of leadership remembers the people who extended that attention to him.