If your VLM based pipeline is really that good for OCR - and no reason to believe it cant be - why dont you just launch that as a product. The way I see it is that these are two separate products - VLM based OCR for messy documents, and automated credit review for developing markets.

I have some experience setting up automated OCR systems for one of the largest fintechs in Australia - and VLM based pipelines can definitely give an extra edge and this is easily a very large TAM market. However, existing players might also be upgrading their systems so might not be too easy to disrupt. That being said, credit analysis is also a very hard problem, but I am not sure how much quality OCR would help here.

Given what I know, I would focus on the VLM/OCR problem rather than the Credit scoring one.