Tala has been a pioneer in the alternative lending space. Founded by Shivani Siroya, the Santa Monica based company has demonstrated tremendous success in providing credit to people who are unbanked. Tala uses machine learning from a user’s smartphone to […]
FinTech
“Like” this post if you want a better credit score
Financial institutions are increasingly turning to nontraditional forms of data to evaluate creditworthiness. Lenddo is one of the start-ups seeking to change the way individuals are evaluated.
#include1billion – Financial Inclusion by Data Analytics
Lenddo and EFL are trying to achieve financial inclusion of underbanked population by using alternative scoring model using social media, mobile phone and psychometric data.
Lufax: The World’s Largest P2P Lending is Pivoting from Core Business
Lufax: The World’s Largest P2P Lending is Pivoting from Core Business
Venmo: The Leader (?) in Peer to Peer Payments
How Venmo founders created a leading platform in the mobile payment space.
Lending Club: Platform Success but P2P failure?
Lending club founder was able to build a robust lending platform against significant headwinds, but it's unclear if the resulting product matches the initial vision of a "peer to peer' marketplace.
No Signs of Surrender at This Retail Bank
Many have prophesied the death of retail banking – and while the traditional retail model may be dead, at least one traditional bank is changing to keep up with the times.
AR/VR, Bloomberg and Financial Services
Compared to other industries, applications of AR/VR in financial services are few and far in between. Below I will give a quick overview of the applications, their challenges, opportunities and zoom in on my former employer, Bloomberg, and its experiment […]
Is FICO outdated? ZestFinance: An Alternative to the FICO Credit Score
In 2010, roughly 8.3% of US consumers, or 19 million people, were considered ‘unscorable’ by FICO, a credit rating service whose models serve as a key underpinning of the US system for assessing credit worthiness.[1] Included in this contingent of unscorable consumers are those lacking a credit history, read: millennials, who represent an untapped market opportunity for lenders. Also excluded from FICO are the underbanked, those who lack bank accounts and primarily transact in cash. Not only are the underbanked denied access to loans based on typical FICO filters, but they must resort to predatory alternatives, such as payday loans, whose prohibitively high interest rates trap them in a vicious cycle of deep indebtedness that is difficult to dig out of. Has the FICO score become an obsolete filter? And can a lender step in to provide loans to these underserved segments where traditional banks have neglected to do so – and profitably?
Quantopian – Crowdsourcing Investment Algorithms
Quantopian has created a programmer-friendly toolkit allowing programmers to profit from trading algorithms