Instantor's Blog

There is an unbelievable amount of data in the world. Moreover, it just keeps growing and growing: according to Domo, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every single day. That’s 25, followed by 17 zeros. Alternatively, 2.5 billion billion bytes. It’s a lot!

It’s hard to articulate just how much data there is in the world. That’s where the term Big Data comes from - the exponential growth and availability of large data sets. Even more broadly, the term Big Data also encompasses the speed with which the data is created, and it’s inherent complexity due to its sheer volume. Photos, internet searches, credit card transactions, emails. Data comes at us from all angles, all the time.

The financial services landscape has been radically evolving for the past decade, and credit scoring is no exception. Once the domain of a small number of credit bureaus, alternative credit scoring is democratising the credit underwriting process for banks and other lenders. This global trend shows no signs of slowing down, especially with the rise of digital-only banks and as more and more people use banking in unconventional ways, e.g. applying for a mortgage online.

I am unashamedly a millennial. I engage in many of the behaviours that make my generation distinctly different to the one that came before it. I am highly individualistic, perhaps some would even say narcissistic. I’ve had social media and access to the internet for as long as I can remember. I don’t really recall a time before having a mobile phone. I spent much of my life in education striving to get the qualifications that my parents and teachers had told me I needed. I studied sustainability, and for a while, I dedicated my life to saving the world and volunteering. I am in so many ways a complete cliché.

Getting credit or a mortgage declined is a big concern for many of us. In fact, most of us will need to use credit at some point in our lives, so it’s a big deal when we are declined. That’s why credit scores are important – to improve our chances of gaining access to credit and enabling us to navigate quickly through life’s twists and turns. 

This year has been named by Forbes as ‘the year of open APIs’. The implementation of open APIs in all sectors of the financial industry (FI) from banks to FinTechs has exploded around the world. FIs and governments are evaluating how open APIs can encourage industry openness and competitiveness, whilst simultaneously providing consumers with better user experiences. 

The name of the game is Open Banking and the UK has been a leader in this expanding global movement: there are already over 22 jurisdictions across the world that have begun to consider, or have implemented their own Open Banking initiative.

At Instantor we want to contribute to a more inclusive and fair financing market. We do this by making people's financial lives easier and helping organisations to understand their customers’ true financial capacity, using transactional data.

Our client, Lendify – Sweden’s largest marketplace for loans – wrote a great opinion article on how traditional credit assessments need to be updated. How new technology, like our AI credit predictor – Insight – can provide a more accurate and detailed risk analysis for lending organisations and be a force for a healthier lending market. Please enjoy a translated version by us that was originally published in Swedish by Realtid.se in October 2018.

For many of the world’s poorest countries, financial inclusion is a big problem. Large numbers of people have trouble just getting a bank account, let alone access to credit – particularly in countries like Colombia, Ukraine and Vietnam, just to name a few.