Chandan Pal, CMO
Scienaptic AI
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a white paper excerpt
One evening, out of curiosity, I decided to check my credit scores using two popular apps: Capital One and American Express. What I found was perplexing. The discrepancies between my VantageScore and my FICO® Score were startling. Firstly, one of them indicated that I was a subprime borrower and secondly, both scores, based on data from reputable sources, painted vastly different pictures of my creditworthiness.
This experience got me thinking: if such inconsistencies can occur for someone like me, with years of financial stability and a robust credit history, what does this mean for those who are just starting out or who lack access to traditional financial services? We often hear how these scores help drive financial inclusion, but my experience suggested that there might be deeper issues at play.
I’ll delve into the specifics of my credit history some other time, but this encounter underscored a critical point: our financial systems, designed to assess and include, might be inadvertently excluding the very people they aim to help. It was a story worth exploring, not just for my sake, but for the millions of unbanked and underbanked individuals striving for financial stability.
The Reality of Financial Inclusion: Data Doesn't Lie
It is estimated that nearly 2 billion adults worldwide lack access to formal financial systems. In the U.S. alone, approximately 62 million people have insufficient credit history to obtain a traditional credit score, with 26 million of them being completely credit invisible.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Click below to download the entire white paper.