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This is pretty obviously a bad idea. Credit agencies already have all the relevant information, whether you take out loans or credit cards and whether you pay t

by mnd999 5y ago

This is pretty obviously a bad idea. Credit agencies already have all the relevant information, whether you take out loans or credit cards and whether you pay them on time. Anything else is at best correlation, which as we know is not the same as causation.

Sharlin 5y ago
Having a "credit score" is not common in the EU in the first place, and even rarer is using credit just in order to prove that you're a good customer.
- n_ary 5y ago
  Not sure about EU but Germany has SCHUFA scores, which hold equal power and works similarly.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    The EU doesn't have a common credit score system because it doesn't have a common consumer banking system. Some countries have individual systems, but others don't.
londons_explore 5y ago
Correlation is plenty if your goal is to be right most of the time and have the loans you sell be slightly more profitable than a competitor. People forget that all these big data schemes are rather inaccurate at the individual user level, and that doesn't matter to the companies that use the data.
HALtheWise 5y ago
Unfortunately, while that may be enough data for you as a (presumably) relatively affluent position, there are a _lot_ of people who aren't able to get loans today because they don't have that sort of history. For the subset of those people who would in fact be able to pay back loans, they have a ton to gain from improvements in credit score accuracy. I had a friend at a startup trying to close some of that gap by reporting one-time rent payments to credit agencies, and the sheer scale of benefits they were trying to bring their users is hard to overstate. I guess my point here is that there are in fact large portions of the population that are not well served by credit scores today, and just because you are not among them doesn't mean they don't exist.
- Gene_Parmesan 5y ago
  Okay, but search and browsing history is not a good way to extend this data for these populations.
6510 5y ago
You can get a bad score over truly stupid incidents. There is clearly a market.

by mnd999 5y ago

Sharlin 5y ago

Having a "credit score" is not common in the EU in the first place, and even rarer is using credit just in order to prove that you're a good customer.

n_ary 5y ago
Not sure about EU but Germany has SCHUFA scores, which hold equal power and works similarly.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  The EU doesn't have a common credit score system because it doesn't have a common consumer banking system. Some countries have individual systems, but others don't.

londons_explore 5y ago

Correlation is plenty if your goal is to be right most of the time and have the loans you sell be slightly more profitable than a competitor. People forget that all these big data schemes are rather inaccurate at the individual user level, and that doesn't matter to the companies that use the data.

HALtheWise 5y ago

Unfortunately, while that may be enough data for you as a (presumably) relatively affluent position, there are a _lot_ of people who aren't able to get loans today because they don't have that sort of history. For the subset of those people who would in fact be able to pay back loans, they have a ton to gain from improvements in credit score accuracy. I had a friend at a startup trying to close some of that gap by reporting one-time rent payments to credit agencies, and the sheer scale of benefits they were trying to bring their users is hard to overstate. I guess my point here is that there are in fact large portions of the population that are not well served by credit scores today, and just because you are not among them doesn't mean they don't exist.

Gene_Parmesan 5y ago
Okay, but search and browsing history is not a good way to extend this data for these populations.

6510 5y ago

You can get a bad score over truly stupid incidents. There is clearly a market.