Company uses cellphone records to gauge credit risk
Source: Boston Globe
Does the number of text messages you send, or the time of day you make your first phone call, say something important about how credit-worthy you are?
Cignifi, a small Cambridge start-up with roots in the UK, believes it does. The company is out raising $2 million in funding to commercialize its technology this year, after a pilot test in Brazil in 2011.
... Cignifi has developed sophisticated modeling software that can look at usage data from consumers' mobile phones and make predictions about who that person is and how they live. There's no single data point —like making lots of short calls between 2 and 5 a.m. every morning —that suggests that someone is a bad credit risk. But Hakim says, "The way you use your phone is a proxy for your lifestyle. It's not random. So we're looking at things like the length of calls, the time of day, and the location you make them from. Also things like whether you top up (a pre-paid SIM card) regularly. We want to see how stable the patterns are. When you look at that, you can create these behavioral clusters that give you information about users' appetite for new (financial) products, and their ability to repay a debt."
... Hakim says Cignifi doesn't have plans to deploy the technology in the U.S. in the near-term. "The business opportunity is so much bigger in Brazil, India, China, and Mexico, where you have around half a billion people in those four markets alone who have a mobile phone but no banking relationship," he says.
Read more: http://articles.boston.com/2012-01-20/business/30647956_1_mobile-phone-credit-score-brazil
= new reply since forum marked as read
