CredoLab, an alternative credit scoring FinTech company, has launched in South Africa to help financial institutions and other lenders credit score more people, especially those who are new to bank and new to credit.
Launched in Singapore three years ago, CredoLab develops bank-grade digital scorecards using smartphone device metadata.
CredoLab signed up two banks and a leading airtime credit provider in SA earlier this year.
CredoLab’s sales director for Europe and Africa, Michel Massain, was in the country last week meeting other large financial institutions, credit bureaus and consumer lenders.
“You need a credit score to participate in the economy but how can someone with no credit history get a credit score? And how can they start a business if they can’t lend money to do so?” asks Massain.
“By harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence applied to smartphone data, we allow lenders to credit score people that traditional methods can’t. This use of predictive analytics for credit scoring enables financial services providers expand their pool of borrowers while keeping risks under control.”
Too many people are invisible to lenders because of a lack of data for risk assessment. Traditional credit scoring has become inadequate, opening the door for informal and rogue money lending and keeping underbanked people out of the economy.
“We started up to solve on one problem: the lack of instruments available to assess the credit worthiness of nearly two billion consumers globally,” says Massain.
CredoLab collects more than 50 000 data points from a customer’s smartphone through a state-of-the-art propriety mobile technology, and turns them into more than 500 thousand behavioural features. Their collection process is always consensual and permissioned. The collected data is anonymised, securely stored within the country, and never shared with third parties.
“Too many people remain locked outside of the mainstream economy,” CEO and Co-Founder of CredoLab, Peter Barcak says.
“Our hope is that CredoLab will help to remove a key barrier to entry in SA and on the African continent and complement traditional credit scoring systems with the power of behavioural data.”