Singapore based alternative credit scoring fintech company, CredoLab, has officially launched in Kenya to push financial inclusion by providing credit scoring.
The company aims to drive financial inclusion by credit scoring more people, especially those who are currently unbanked and are new to credit. CredoLab has announced that it is in negotiations with large financial institutions, digital banks, credit bureaus, consumer lenders and retail operations in Kenya.
CredoLab collects more than 50,000 data points from a customer’s smartphone through mobile technology and turns them into more than 500 thousand behavioural features. The company assures that the collected data is anonymised, and securely stored within the country. All digital scorecards are customised for clients. This use of non-traditional data and predictive analytics for credit scoring enables lenders to expand their pool of borrowers while keeping risks under control.
Michel Massain, Sales for Europe and Africa at CredoLab says, “With the trend in Kenya of banks shifting from traditional banking halls to digital platforms, our alternative credit scoring technology is perfectly timed to help lenders provide access to sections of the population that have been traditionally financially excluded. You need a credit score to participate in the economy, but what about people who are new to credit and new to bank? How do they get a credit score? 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?”
CredoLab develops digital scorecards for banks, consumer finance companies, auto lenders, online and mobile lenders, insurance companies, and retailers from smartphone device metadata. Their technology crunches nearly 500 thousand features from opt-in smartphone metadata to find the most predictive behavioural patterns before converting them into credit scores. These enable any lender to make the most granular assessments possible of their applicants. The company was established in Singapore in 2016 and has powered almost USD 1 Billion in loans issued after analyzing about 1 trillion data points across 15 countries. The company is backed up funders such Fintonia Group, FORUM, and Walden International.
CredoLab’s technology will come in handy for financial institutions in Kenya. Digital lending platforms such as Tala, Safaricom M-Shwari and Branch are already employing similar technology to be able to give out loans to customers.