What is Customer Profitability Analysis?

Customer Profitability Analysis is a management accounting and a credit underwriting method, allowing businesses and lenders to determine the profitability of each customer or segments of customers, by attributing profits and costs to each customer separately. CPA can be applied at the individual customer level or at the level of customer aggregates / groups.

CPA is a "retrospective" method, which means it analyses past events of different customers, in order to calculate customer profitability for each customer. Equally, research suggests that that credit score does not necessarily impact the lenders' profitability.