This archive report was first published on 2 October 2019.
Kenya is set to revolutionise credit scoring with the launch of CredoLab, a fintech company that uses smartphone data to make credit scoring more accessible.
Launched in 2016 in Singapore, CredoLab aims to solve the problem of assessing the creditworthiness of nearly two billion consumers globally.
According to Michel Massain, Sales Director for Europe and Africa at CredoLab, the company's alternative credit scoring technology is perfectly timed to help lenders provide access to sections of the population that have been traditionally financially excluded.
Massain notes that a fair percentage of people in Kenya remain neglected by the financial sector and are invisible to lenders due to a lack of comprehensive data for risk assessment.
CredoLab collects more than 50,000 data points from a customer's smartphone through a state-of-the-art propriety mobile technology and turns them into more than 500 thousand behavioural features.
The collected data is anonymised, securely stored within the country, and never shared with third parties, ensuring that the collection process is consensual and permissioned.
By harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applied to smartphone data, CredoLab enables financial institutions to grow by reaching new segments previously inaccessible through traditional systems.
CEO and Co-Founder of CredoLab, Peter Barcak, hopes that the company will help to remove a key barrier to entry in Kenya and complement traditional credit scoring systems with the power of behavioural data.
