Executive Summary Our existing algorithmic approach to prescreening loan applicants automatically denies 100% of applicants with a prior history of default. This policy is overly restrictive from a quantitative and business perspective, as many of these individuals possess superior credit scores and lower leverage ratios than those who are regularly approved. This report follows the Data Science lifecycle (Modules 1-5) to analyze the issue and deploy an alternative strategy: a predictive, proxy-target model to identify high-potential applicants within this previously excluded population for manual review. M1: Business Understanding The Problem: The strict business rule (decision tree outcome) automatically denies the 22,858 people who have a prior default. Because this criterion universally drove denial in historic data, any model trained naively on the full dataset learns this as an unbreakable rule. The Question: How can we identify credit-worthy applicants among those with a prior default to refer them for secondary, manual review, thereby increasing overall revenue without disproportionately raising default risk? The Solution Path: Because historical data contains zero approvals for the “Prior Default” target group, we will utilize Proxy Target Modeling. We will train an algorithm exclusively on applicants with no prior defaults to understand what a “good” applicant looks like, and then apply this scoring mechanism back to the “Prior Default” group to identify strong candidates for reconsideration.