The financial services community continues to rally around America’s small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with the understanding that Main Street remains the backbone of economic recovery. As businesses take their first steps toward reopening, there is cautious optimism to be had. A recent U.S. Chamber...
After a long period of pulling back, lenders are finally beginning to find value in financing small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). But after years of finding SMBs too unprofitable to finance, lenders have to play catch-up to develop better underwriting processes for greater accuracy and...
Federal banking regulators support using alternative methods to assess creditworthiness to help high-risk people get loans, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Tuesday (Dec. 3). Instead of using traditional credit scores, lenders can look at alternative data like borrowers’ cash flow. This approach “may...
If data makes the world go ’round, so, too, does it garner investor interest, as evidenced by venture capital and other investors’ funds coming into the coffers of corporates that scrape the web for information. Thinknum Thinknum, which provides web-sourced alternative data, has garnered $11.6...
September 27, 2021
The problem of financial inclusion is an acute one in the United States. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has said that nearly 50 million Americans have no credit score. And without those scores, it’s tough to get a loan. Without a loan, paradoxically, it’s tough to get that credit score. Early Warning […]
December 04, 2019
Federal banking regulators support using alternative methods to assess creditworthiness to help high-risk people get loans, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Tuesday (Dec. 3). Instead of using traditional credit scores, lenders can look at alternative data like borrowers’ cash flow. This approach “may help firms evaluate the creditworthiness of consumers who currently may […]
September 15, 2017
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a no-action letter to Upstart Network, the first of its kind since the government watchdog created the no-action letter program to encourage innovations that...
February 26, 2016
Lenders are beginning to doubt the effectiveness of using a potential borrower’s social media accounts as indicators of creditworthiness. As The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday (Feb. 24), regulatory hurdles, data...