Lenders Can Examine Your Social Media Profile to Assess Your Creditworthiness
It’s not just your FICO score that matters to lenders. More and more social data companies are popping up to help lenders, landlords, and other service providers assess your creditworthiness. In other words, they use your online presence to make decisions about your application.
Your FICO score calculates your credit behavior using quantitative methods, such as how long you delay payment or how much credit you have. On the other hand, quality data is based on things like your Facebook social interactions. Or the topics you searched for on the Internet, such as payday loans. This gives lenders a completely different perspective on your life to assess your credit risk.
Credit comparison site TotallyMoney.com explains:
Many of them, including Singapore-based Lenddo and US-based Moven, founded in 2011, and Score Assured, founded in 2015, search for keywords based on the grounds that if you say ‘drunk’ or ‘ party, then you are less likely to be reliable, which will negatively impact your account – but others go even further … Hello Soda has developed a technology called PROFILE that they aim to provide to other lenders. It analyzes the customer’s overall social presence using language processing and psycholinguistics to identify life events, due dates, location, age and employment, among others, and generate their social credit score … InVenture and Friendly Score skip reading candidates. posts and instead see their browsing history and which sites they visit … Searches for “payday loans” or debt management information stand out as their first ports of call in this analysis, but they will even check your cell phone call history, scan numbers premium and other financial companies.
The article explains that other companies are looking at your browsing history and the sites you visit for words that stand out like Payday Loans.
In China, the government is actually planning to introduce a social credit system based on this kind of data . There are no statistics on how many countries in the United States or anywhere else use such data, but the fact that these companies exist shows that there is a market for lenders and other suppliers who need information on applicants that exceeds FICO scores. At the very least, this is something to be aware of as you surf your own social channels and online activities.
Social Credit Ratings – Your Friends, Your Purchase History, and Your Financial Future | Completely money