Pagaya Brings AI Underwriting to Upgrade’s Travel BNPL Platform

Pagaya Technologies is bringing its AI underwriting engine into Upgrade’s Flex Pay, the buy now, pay later product that thousands of travel brands already use at checkout. The June 8, 2026 expansion lifts the multi-year partnership between Pagaya (NASDAQ: PGY) and Upgrade beyond personal loans and into a new asset class at the point of sale. Travel is the first segment in scope.

The deal lands a month after Pagaya embedded its AI in Experian’s marketplace, and it sets up a clear test of whether real-time underwriting can hold its accuracy across more verticals, more partners, and a bigger regulatory footprint. Simply Wall St’s analyst estimate snapshot, last updated June 8, 2026, puts Pagaya’s 2028 revenue at $1,889 million and earnings at $298 million.

What Pagaya and Upgrade Just Put on the Table

Pagaya Technologies Ltd. and Upgrade, Inc. announced on June 8, 2026 that Pagaya’s AI-driven credit decisioning will run inside Flex Pay, Upgrade’s buy now, pay later solution. The June 8 announcement expanding Pagaya’s role in Flex Pay, distributed by Business Wire, frames the move as a significant milestone, taking the two companies past personal loans and into a new asset class. With Pagaya’s model inside the checkout, Upgrade can extend its installment plans to a broader set of customers at the moment of purchase.

By leveraging Pagaya’s AI-powered decisioning within our Flex Pay product, we are enabling more people to access the payment solutions they need, allowing them to make thoughtful purchases now and pay overtime through a quick and easy application process.

Tom Botts, President of Flex Pay at Upgrade, said the integration is built to make monthly payment options available to a wider applicant pool, while Sanjiv Das, President of Pagaya, framed the deal as part of a strategy to extend the company’s network into purpose-driven transactions. Travel is the first vertical where the new underwriting layer is live.

Why Travel Comes First

Travel is the beachhead for a reason. Upgrade describes Flex Pay as a trusted payment method at thousands of travel brands, and that merchant footprint is the cleanest way to test Pagaya’s AI on a high-transaction-value flow. Higher ticket sizes give the underwriting model more room to discriminate among applicants, and the repeat nature of travel bookings gives the lender more data on each customer over time. A traveler financing a vacation is committing to a multi-thousand-dollar purchase with clear repayment capacity, which is the kind of decision where AI underwriting can be benchmarked against legacy scorecards.

Upgrade’s Flex Pay travel partner history shows a steady cadence of new integrations. The most recent, JetBlue Vacations on April 21, 2026, brings monthly installments to flight and hotel packages booked through mobile, desktop, or call center. The deal before that, WestJet on January 15, 2026, spread flight costs into monthly payments for Canadian travelers.

For Pagaya, the strategic significance is that travel is a high-margin, high-intent checkout moment. The model gets a clean real-world test on larger, lower-frequency purchases that personal loan underwriting rarely touches directly.

• WestJet chose Flex Pay on January 15, 2026 to spread flight costs into monthly payments for Canadian travelers.
• JetBlue Vacations chose Flex Pay on April 21, 2026 to offer monthly installments on flight and hotel packages booked through mobile, desktop, or call center.
• Expedia Group chose Flex Pay on March 5, 2025 to power cruise vacation financing across five of its brands in the US and Canada.
• Resorts World Las Vegas chose Flex Pay on October 17, 2025, among the first Strip properties to offer the product.

The breadth of those deals gives Pagaya a real-world credit flow on day one, and a chance to measure how the AI model performs at scale on a vertical that personal loan underwriting rarely captures. The strategic question for 2026 is how quickly the approval rate at the checkout matches the approval rate in Pagaya’s personal loan business, and how the credit performance compares across the two channels over the same booking windows. Each new merchant category the AI underwrites adds a data point to the model, which is the feedback loop Pagaya needs to justify the wider distribution. The next test will be whether the same underwriting engine holds up at a $2,000 flight-and-hotel booking the same way it does at a $15,000 personal loan.

The 2028 Numbers Pagaya Has to Hit

The expansion is the kind of catalyst that Pagaya’s 2028 revenue and earnings forecast is already leaning on. Simply Wall St, pulling analyst estimates last updated June 8, 2026, sees Pagaya’s revenue rising from $1,329 million over the trailing twelve months through March 31, 2026 to $1,889 million in 2028, with earnings forecast to climb from $94 million in the same period to $298 million in 2028. The forecast page is the source for those numbers.

Those numbers imply annual growth of 12.6% for revenue and 35.2% for earnings through the forecast window, with future return on equity projected at 36.2% over a three-year horizon. The margin profile depends on the AI model converting more approved applicants per partner channel, not just on more channels existing.

• 2028 revenue forecast: $1,889 million
• 2028 earnings forecast: $298 million
• Forecast annual revenue growth: 12.6%
• Forecast annual earnings growth: 35.2%
• Forecast three-year return on equity: 36.2%

Flex Pay is the most visible test of that thesis in 2026, the first new partner rollout that has to land cleanly for the 2028 number to stay within reach. If Pagaya can convert even a modest share of Upgrade’s travel checkout flow into approved AI-underwritten loans, the contribution to revenue per partner would climb. The model would then have evidence to point to when it pitches the next integrator.

The Second-Order Problem With Wider Distribution

The same wider distribution that makes the forecast easier to hit is what makes it harder to defend if anything goes wrong, because the same volume that lifts the 2028 number is the same volume that regulators, partners, and the press scrutinize when credit performance softens. Personal loan underwriting at Pagaya’s scale runs through a known credit box, a known product set, and a regulatory frame built up over years. Travel BNPL at the point of sale touches more borrowers per minute, with a wider spread of credit profiles, under consumer-protection scrutiny that the CFPB and state regulators have been tightening on the BNPL category in particular. The data inputs look different too, with travel bookings spiking around holidays, weather events, and family events, which is a different seasonality pattern than personal loans, where demand is more evenly distributed across the year. The mismatch between the model’s training distribution and the new distribution is the first thing regulators and partners will press Pagaya to document as the rollout expands.

The model’s accuracy has to hold across more subpopulations, more transaction sizes, and more repeat-borrower behavior, a tougher test than the one Pagaya’s older personal loan book posed. A model that performs in personal loans can drift in BNPL, where the same applicant looks different at a $2,000 flight-and-hotel checkout than at a $15,000 personal loan request, and the model has fewer comparable prior decisions to anchor on. Fraud and first-party misuse patterns also look different at the point of sale than in a personal loan application, since the time between intent and commitment is measured in minutes rather than days. The harder problem is the time lag between a model’s approval decision and the credit performance data that validates it, which can stretch a full quarter or more for new verticals.

Our expanded partnership with Upgrade to integrate into Flex Pay underscores the strength of our long-term relationship, as we deepen our collaboration beyond personal loans.

Partner concentration is the other pressure point. Upgrade is now both Pagaya’s largest legacy personal loan partner and the entry point into travel BNPL, so a single partner recalibrating its volume, its risk appetite, or its merchant mix would land on the same line of Pagaya’s revenue.

Das described the strategy as one of extending the company’s network across new asset classes, language that points to a portfolio approach rather than a single-vendor bet. The Experian integration spreads that risk on the personal loan side, while the Flex Pay deal, at least initially, deepens the travel concentration. The next material test is whether Pagaya can land a second large BNPL or point-of-sale partner in 2026, with the same model then running across two distinct checkout flows. A second partner at comparable scale would give the model a second test, which is what regulators and partners will press Pagaya to show as the rollout expands.

The wider footprint is also a wider data footprint, with its own regulatory weight. Pagaya’s press materials describe a vast data network with insights from over $1 trillion in annual loan applications, a figure that travels with the company as it adds partners, and that regulators and consumer advocates are likely to read closely as BNPL volumes grow. The combination of more partners and more data raises the bar on explainability, on data use disclosures, and on the model audit trail that BNPL partners and their banking-as-a-service backstops will want to see.

The Experian Deal Set the Pattern a Month Earlier

Pagaya’s partnership with Experian, announced on May 11, 2026, embedding Pagaya in Experian Marketplace, set the template that the Flex Pay deal is now extending. The Experian integration puts Pagaya’s underwriting in front of over 80 million Experian members, with lenders using Experian’s Activate platform to identify eligible consumer loan applicants across the credit spectrum. The release quotes Rakesh Patel, Executive Vice President of Experian Marketplace, and Sanjiv Das, Co-Founder and President of Pagaya, framing the partnership as a path to reach borrowers who might otherwise be overlooked by legacy systems. The deal covers credit cards, personal loans, and auto insurance, not just personal loans. It positions Pagaya inside one of the largest consumer credit shopping destinations in the US, with a captive audience for the AI-driven credit decisioning layer.

The two moves share a clear shape, with each one placing Pagaya’s AI model inside a larger partner’s distribution, where the partner brings the traffic, the merchant integrations, and the regulatory infrastructure, and Pagaya brings the credit decisioning. The wider question is how quickly the regulatory and model-risk posture catches up with the speed of the rollout.

Where PGY Sits Against BNPL and Lending Peers

PGY has been one of the stronger performers in the BNPL-and-lending group since the start of 2026. Per Zacks, shares gained 34.9% in the three months through June 8, 2026, against 1.4% for the industry. Pagaya carried a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) at the time of the Flex Pay announcement.

The peer set Zacks flags includes Enova International (ENVA) and LendingClub (LC), both at Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). ENVA’s current-year earnings estimate has been revised 4.1% upward over the prior 60 days, and ENVA shares gained 23.3% over the prior three months, while LC’s earnings estimate has been revised 4.9% upward and LC shares gained 17.5% over the same window. The peer performance lines up with the broader BNPL-and-lending basket, which is up modestly year to date but has not matched PGY’s pace. The relative performance reflects a market that is paying for AI-underwriting pure plays with limited dilution, and discounting more diversified lenders with a higher cost of capital.

The growth trajectories sit in different lanes, with PGY the AI-underwriting pure-play riding partner distribution, ENVA the broader online lender serving non-prime consumers, and LC the established marketplace lender moving deeper into bank-style products. The Flex Pay deal sharpens what PGY actually is for investors, and that clarity is part of why the share price has run alongside the news flow rather than after it. Zacks’ own analyst page carries the standard caveat that any ranking is one of several factors, and the underlying forecasts depend on the partner rollouts the Flex Pay and Experian deals are meant to accelerate.

Each of the three is a different way to play the same macro credit cycle, and each has a different exposure to AI underwriting adoption. PGY’s setup is the most direct read on whether AI-driven credit decisioning can scale across more verticals without model drift, which is the test Flex Pay starts to run this quarter. The peer comparison is a useful frame for sizing the bet, not a forecast of where the shares land over the next twelve months. The next data point that will move that framing is the next quarter’s partner-volume disclosure.

Frequently Asked Questions

What did Pagaya and Upgrade announce on June 8, 2026?

Pagaya Technologies and Upgrade, Inc. said on June 8, 2026 that Pagaya’s AI-driven credit decisioning is being integrated into Flex Pay, Upgrade’s buy now, pay later solution. The deal extends an existing multi-year partnership from personal loans into a point-of-sale travel financing product, with travel merchants as the first segment. The release frames the integration as part of a broader push to extend the company’s point-of-sale business into more vertical-specific use cases.

Why is the partnership starting with travel merchants?

Flex Pay is already in use at thousands of travel merchants, including airlines, hotel groups, and online travel platforms, with the JetBlue Vacations integration alone bringing monthly installments to flight and hotel packages booked through mobile, desktop, or call center. Higher transaction values and repeat-booking behavior give the underwriting model a clean real-world test in a vertical that personal loan underwriting rarely touches directly. Travel is also the segment where the new underwriting layer is going live first, per the June 8 release.

What revenue and earnings figures has Pagaya’s analyst forecast set for 2028?

Simply Wall St’s analyst estimate snapshot, last updated June 8, 2026, shows Pagaya’s 2028 revenue at $1,889 million and earnings at $298 million, up from $1,329 million in revenue and $94 million in earnings over the trailing twelve months through March 31, 2026. The forecast implies annual growth of 12.6% for revenue and 35.2% for earnings through 2028. Future return on equity is projected at 36.2% over a three-year horizon, on the same estimate snapshot.

How does this deal change Pagaya’s risk profile?

The integration gives Pagaya’s AI underwriting a wider distribution and a bigger regulatory footprint, including consumer-protection scrutiny on the BNPL category. The model has to perform across more subpopulations, more transaction sizes, and more repeat-borrower behavior, while partner concentration on the travel side deepens in the near term. The mitigant is the parallel Experian integration, which spreads risk on the personal loan side.

What other partnership did Pagaya announce recently?

On May 11, 2026, Pagaya and Experian announced a strategic partnership to embed Pagaya’s AI underwriting into Experian Marketplace, a shopping destination for credit cards, personal loans, and auto insurance, accessible to over 80 million Experian members. The release positions the integration as another way for lenders to identify eligible consumer loan applicants across the credit spectrum.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Investments carry risk, including the loss of principal, and past performance does not guarantee future results. Figures cited reflect sources accessed on or before June 15, 2026 and may have changed since. Consult a qualified financial professional before making investment decisions.