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 [...]
Category: Through a new lens
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 [...]
Juxtaposition
Two stories from very different contexts came across my news feed today. The first announced a major investment in a small business lending service. The other took a fresh look at the war on drugs and the origins of addiction. Let's begin with the piece I read first thing this morning. I have written earlier [...]
Think outside the black box
I woke up this morning thinking about black boxes. Odd for a beautiful Sunday morning but interesting timing. This morning's New York Times carried a piece on big data and the implications for privacy and more. Alex Pentland of MIT was quoted at some length which took me to his various musings on the subject. [...]
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