Erki Kert, former board member and chief of investment banking at LHV Pank, has set up a company called Big Data Scoring that has brought to the market a model for credit scoring based on social media data.
Erki Kert's business offers credit scoring based on social media
6th May 2013, 17:10
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The company is active at this point in Estonia, Finland and Poland.
The company said in a press release it wishes to offer banks and other creditors an opportunity to improve credit quality and at the same time serve a larger number of customers. The credit assessment model of Big Data Scoring has been worked out for European markets, it said.
"Banks across the globe are increasingly searching for ways how to better employ massive data amounts in their work," said Erki Kert, manager and co-founder of Big Data Scoring. The company has a solution to offer for European markets that uses the large amount of information available on the internet and social networking sites.
"The digital footprint of each applicant has strong predictive powers when it comes to determining their credit behavior. For a lender, it's like having a week to get to know the client properly. We often know more about borrowers than their family or relatives do," Big Data Scoring says on its website.
The models used by Big Data Scoring predict on the basis of data from Facebook and other online sources which clients are more likely to default on their loan. In developing the model the company has gathered over 45 million lines of data on the internet which it has combined with real-life payment behavior data in a number of European countries over a period of more than a year.
For non-European markets the company offers tailor-made solutions.
Registered in Finland, Big Data Scoring Oy belongs to Social Media Holding OU, an Estonian company 100 percent owned by Kert. The second founder of Big Data Scoring is Valkea Media S.A., a leading social media services provider and publisher of Poland's biggest business newspaper, Warsaw Business Journal. Big Data Scoring has offices in Tallinn, Warsaw and Helsinki.