HL Hunt bets lenders will pay $99 a month to stop hand-building Metro 2 files

Metro 2 is the decades-old data format lenders must use to report tradelines to Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, and generating a compliant file by hand — mapping loan statuses, balances and account codes into the format’s rigid header, base, J-segment and K-segment structure — has long been the kind of unglamorous compliance chore that either eats staff hours or requires expensive legacy software. HL Hunt’s Metro 2 Software is built to automate that conversion end to end, and unlike some of the company’s other recent product pages, this one describes a live, purchasable service rather than a waitlist.

The core workflow, per HL Hunt’s page, is four steps: upload loan data in any format (CSV, Excel, JSON, or push it via API), let the AI map fields to the full Metro 2 specification, validate and auto-fix flagged errors, then submit to all three bureaus with one click and track acceptance in real time. The company claims 99.9% validation accuracy, file conversion in under five seconds, and support for more than 426 Metro 2 fields across the header, base, J1/J2, K1-K4, L1 and N1 segments and trailer records.

Two features stand out beyond basic conversion. First, HL Hunt says its validation engine checks files against more than 200 Metro 2 rules before submission and offers AI-suggested one-click fixes for common errors, aiming to prevent the bureau rejections that plague manual reporting. Second, the platform includes built-in dispute management for ACDV (Automated Consumer Dispute Verifications) and AUD requests from the bureaus, with AI pre-filling responses based on the lender’s existing data — folding a normally separate compliance workflow into the same tool.

On pricing, HL Hunt positions itself explicitly against the alternative: a Starter tier at $99 a month for up to 500 tradelines with CSV upload and email support, a Business tier at $299 for up to 5,000 tradelines adding REST API access and dispute management, and a custom Enterprise tier for unlimited volume with dedicated onboarding and 24/7 SLA support. The company’s own comparison table claims legacy Metro 2 software costs $500 to $2,000 a month plus setup fees — a meaningful gap if HL Hunt’s accuracy and speed claims hold up in practice for a given lender’s loan mix.

The target market spans banks and credit unions replacing legacy mainframe reporting, API-first fintech lenders, auto and mortgage servicers with more complex tradelines, credit card issuers, personal loan lenders, and credit builders — plus SaaS platforms that want to offer bureau reporting as a white-label feature to their own lending clients. That breadth suggests HL Hunt is trying to serve the same compliance need across very different loan types with a single AI-driven mapping engine rather than a bespoke integration per lender type.

As with HL Hunt’s other product lines, the specific performance figures — the 99.9% accuracy rate, the sub-five-second conversion, the 426-field coverage — are the company’s own marketing claims, not numbers independently verified by this publication or benchmarked against a specific competitor’s live product. Lenders evaluating the tool should request a trial run against their own historical tradelines and confirm the CDIA-compliance and FCRA data-furnishing claims directly, particularly given how costly a bureau-rejected or inaccurate reporting file can be for a lender’s compliance obligations.