The Atlantic Monthly recently published an essay covering the history of credit bureaus. I thought of the number of times people have challenged my descriptions of bureaus and small business credit. "But everyone knows they are about consumer credit (emphasis theirs)!" As this piece makes clear, the mercantile agency that would become Dun & Bradstreet [...]
Author: lumenous
Regs to help small businesses?
It was cold and windy when I boarded Metro-North at Fordham Saturday morning. My destination was a conference at Yale's law school: "Unlocking the Black Box: The Promise and Limits of Algorithmic Accountability in the Professions." Anything about black box systems grabs my attention. This particular conference was organized by Frank Pasquale, a law professor [...]
A humble API
This morning I met with a group of women interested in financial technology innovation. I gave them an overview of Descant technology and its significance to small businesses trying to access capital and credit. The questions were many, thoughtful, and challenging. I especially enjoyed the technology questions. I love to talk about how we thought [...]
Santa’s Credit Score!
A Canadian colleague just sent me an email pointing out that the US views Santa Claus as an indebted independent toy distributor with a FICO score while Canada just issued him a passport. We Americans just love to score people it seems. You can follow the links above or here and here to see for [...]
Citizen Scores . . . Sigh
I was going to give the big data credit profiling posts a rest. I was sure more interesting updates would justify a post of a different sort. Then along came the news that China has developed a new score that rates creditworthiness and, ummm, good citizenship. This first piece delves into the concept itself. Here [...]
10M women own businesses in the U.S.
Just saw this headline at CNN Money "U.S. sees big spike in black and Hispanic women entrepreneurs" The data comes from census studies dating back to 2012 but are just showing up in the press now. Lots of interesting bits in a not very long piece. Alas, women of color still make a lot less [...]
I’ll show you my credit score, if you’ll show me . . .
I just came across the news that Facebook has a patent on an invention that allows lenders to view the credit scores of our circle of friends on Facebook to determine whether or not we are creditworthy. Check out some coverage here. I couldn't be more concerned about how social data are being collected in [...]
Peer-to-peer not so much
Data and Society is a think/do tank in New York City, initially funded by Microsoft and supported today by prominent organizations such as The Ford Foundation, Omidyar Network, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The team and an impressive group of Fellows (some of them faculty on sabbatical from their universities) take on the [...]
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