The longest running one-on-one interview show in all of fintech, since 2013
The longest running one-on-one interview show in all of fintech, since 2013
The longest running one-on-one interview show in all of fintech, since 2013
When we really started covering financial inclusion and financial health here at LendIt five years ago it seemed that we had a very long way to go. Tens of millions of consumers were still left outside the financial system with no credit score and therefore had little to no access to credit. That has changed a great deal in the last five years. At the same time we have seen an explosion in Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) platforms.
Most countries in the world today have some kind of centralized repository for credit data. But this data exists in silos, cut off from the rest of the world. For immigrants moving to a different country this has been a real problem. A doctor with a 20-year credit history earning $250,000 a year in, say, Australia is treated as a thin file/no file credit applicant in the U.S. and is rejected for a credit card with a $500 limit. This makes no sense.
The big three credit bureaus, whether in the UK or the US, have excellent coverage on the majority of consumers. But for those people who have never applied for credit, they tend to have very little information. Now, many people have a bank account who have no credit file or a thin file and the data from their bank account, if analyzed well, can prove to be an excellent predictor of creditworthiness.
The way we have stored and used credit information has not fundamentally changed in decades. The big three credit bureaus each have massive databases of personal information on everyone with a credit file. But as we have seen in recent years this is not the best and certainly not the most secure system.