[bctt tweet=”CredoLab, a credit reference bureau based in Singapore, has opened in Nairobi. The firm computes digital scorecards for clients whose requirements, risk appetite, and credit scoring thresholds are unique.”]
Its arrival in the market is set to trigger more intense competition in the credit rating sector, currently dominated by Metropol, Creditinfo and Transunion Africa.
The company is seeking to drive financial inclusion by giving credit scores to people with little banking or credit history such as fresh graduates and people in the informal sector.
“With the trend in Kenya of banks shifting from traditional banking halls to digital platforms, our alternative credit scoring technology is perfectly timed to help lenders provide access to sections of the population that have been traditionally financially excluded,” said CredoLab’s Head of Sales for Europe and Africa Michel Massain.
CredoLab collects more than 50 000 data points from a customer’s smartphone through its mobile technology and turns them into more than 500 thousand behavioural features.
According to the firm, the collected data is anonymized, securely stored within the country and never shared with third parties.
The firm’s Chief Executive Officer Peter Barcak said that CredoLab will help to remove a key barrier to entry in Kenya, among other African countries and complement traditional credit scoring systems with the power of behavioral data.
CredoLab was launched in 2016 in Singapore to address the lack of instruments to assess the creditworthiness of nearly two billion consumers globally.
