Tag Archive

Financial Inclusion 2020 (FI2020) is a global multi-stakeholder movement to achieve full financial inclusion, using the year 2020 as a focal point for action. This blog series will spotlight financial inclusion efforts around the globe and share insights from key thought leaders in financial inclusion, with a specific focus on quality beyond access.

PERC, a “think and do tank” advancing financial inclusion through information services, has been effective in addressing credit invisibility by advocating the use of alternative data in credit reporting, including in Australia, Brazil, China, Kenya, and the U.S. We invited Michael Turner, PERC’s CEO, to submit an opinion piece, and are publishing the results in a three-part series. Part one and two can be found here and here; the following is part three.

Misperceptions abound about how to impact credit information sharing in emerging markets. Let me weigh in on this debate and set the record straight.

• Technology is not the problem. There are abundant and affordable platforms to enable robust information sharing in even the most extreme environments.
• Scoring models are not the problem. FICO, SAS, Dunn and Bradstreet, and a host of multi-national credit bureaus and lenders have plenty of smart mathematicians, computer scientists, statisticians, and others with lots of letters behind their surnames to ensure innovation in this space. The breakthrough that will move markets won’t be found here.
• End-user capacity and incentives are not the problem. Many pro-poor lenders are already using automated underwriting solutions and can quickly assimilate new data or new scoring models.

So if investing in the technology, risk modeling, and end-user trenches aren’t going to galvanize things, let alone revolutionize them, in which trenches will the revolution begin? The answer lies further upstream, in the consumer and commercial credit ecosystems.

The answer is data access.

This is a deceptively simple response and raises a number of related questions. Which data is both predictive of credit worthiness and covers broad segments of the unbanked and underserved populations? Who owns it? Can traditional credit bureaus access this data? Why haven’t they so far? Are other parties needed to provide lenders access to this data? How can data subjects (people) access and “port” their data from mobile payment systems the same way they can carry their credit report information?

Read the rest of this entry »