Philippines-based alternative credit scoring company FinScore has become the first company to determine the creditworthiness of 100% of mobile subscribers in the country— the highest market reach in the Philippine alternative credit scoring market.
According to the firm’s claims, its flagship service enables lenders, including commercial banks, neo banks, buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) platforms, digital lenders, and multi-purpose lenders to determine the creditworthiness of their loan applicants that have little to no credit data.
This is followed by the firm’s successful data-sharing partnership and completion of its integration with G-Xchange Inc. (GXI), allowing the company to calculate telco credit scores for mobile subscribers of industry giant Globe Telecom.
According to Finscore’s reports, the conventional credit scoring services only analyzed a few data variables such as income level, homeownership, job title, and bank history. With over 70% of the unbanked and underbanked adult Filipinos, these traditional methods leave this segment underserved, with reduced ability to get approved for loans. Finscore aids the lenders in extending the credit to this market via the alternative credit scoring based on the Teleco data.
The Teleco data analyzed by Finscore can offer a comprehensive image regarding an individual’s creditworthiness, while the reduction in defaults, surging approval rates and avoiding fraudsters. The data are also not self-reported and can neither be amended nor compromised. They are obtained during the loan application process, and borrowers‘ consent is required to use their information for credit scoring purposes. This ensures data privacy laws and regulations are strictly observed.
Finscore also added that via its advanced proprietary machine learning algorithms like that of the Gradient Boost and Neural Networks, combined with the telco data variables from the two major Philippine telco companies, FinScore can help Filipinos of legal age to gain better access to credit. FinScore has the technology that can offer high predictive power for measuring creditworthiness for all market segments in the Philippines.
Christo Georgiev, Finscore Country Manager and Chief Operations Officer of FinScore, said this development is a significant leap for the company in bolstering financial inclusion in the country.
“We are happy to set the seal on the two years of intensive collaboration with both companies. The fruition of this partnership is our ability to deliver 100% Telco Data Market Coverage in our flagship service. This means that we are now completely actualizing our promise – to provide credit scoring for all. Given the 1:1 ratio of a Filipino to having mobile phones, the volume of Telco data will continue to accumulate and increase over time. This data source has been with a Filipino adult since he started using his mobile phone and SIM card.”
“With this latest Telco Data Credit Scoring service, our partners can enhance and accelerate their risk assessment process, achieve higher approval rate and lower default rates, optimize customer acquisition costs, and even prevent fraud,” Georgiev added.
He also noted that their latest Telco Credit Scoring service aims to support and promote the Open Finance Framework agenda introduced by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP). The circular aims to promote an enabling environment that fosters innovation encourages competition and advances financial inclusion while safeguarding the integrity and stability of the financial system.
“Our partnership with a credible and intelligent credit-scoring firm like FinScore brings us a step closer to financial inclusion as it gives unbanked Filipinos– those who lack credit data– access to loans that may prove life-saving as we continue to battle a prolonged pandemic,” stated Ernest Cu, Globe President, and CEO.
Partners who will subscribe to the service can either integrate via a standard application programming interface (API). Alternatively, they can also use FinScore’s Alternative Credit Evaluation (A.C.E) Portal, a web-based platform that was awarded the 2nd place winner in the Singapore FinTech Festival Global Awards last November 11, 2021. The telco score is provided in less than a second.
Press Release received on Mail
