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First Access Partners With
Vodacom Tanzania
Vodacom Tanzania, the country’s leading mobile network and provider of the M-PESA money transfer service, signed a commercial partnership this year with First Access, a data analytics company. First Access will analyze data generated by mobile customers as they use their phones for communication and banking and will derive credit scores for those individuals. Scores will be customized and made available to ten institutions in the country that currently use First Access’ services. First Access expects the scores to dramatically reduce costs for lending institutions.
American Express’s strategic investment group, American Express Ventures, recently invested in Cignifi, a startup with an analytic platform that calculates credit scores based on mobile phone data, opening credit access to people with a mobile phone but no traditional credit history. At FI2020, we see this as a signal of increasing interest in new models of financial inclusion by traditional financial service providers.
American Express Ventures
Experian, Transunion, and Equifax
Experian and Transunion, two of the biggest U.S. credit bureaus, have started to incorporate rental payment data into credit scores. The two are teaming up with RentTrack, a software that allows tenants to pay rent online, to include these monthly payments in credit reports. TransUnion’s research showed that nearly 20 percent of renters had a 10-point or greater increase in their credit score when rent payments were reported. Experian and Equifax, the third major credit bureau in the U.S., are exploring how to incorporate utility and cable payments into credit reports.
The Asia Pacific Financial Forum (APFF), a new regional platform for the development of financial markets, is working with the Asia Pacific Credit Coalition and PERC to accelerate the implementation of comprehensive credit reporting systems, both public and private. APFF is inviting policy makers from interested countries to join an initiative with private sector actors, multilaterals and academia to help develop credit information sharing systems. Through a series of workshops the initiative will build regulatory capacity, public-private capacity to develop credit bureaus and lenders’ ability to use credit reporting systems.
Asia-Pacific Financial Forum
“It is important to analyze this information, build analytics on top of the information that exists. Just having data for data’s sake is not actually
a solution.”
– Mark Hookey
(Demyst Data)