One of Russia’s largest banking firms is making a game of the credit application process using psychometric scoring.
The Entrepreneurial Finance Lab (EFL) score, which has been adopted by Sovcombank, uses psychometrics and behavioural data to assess a person’s attitude toward credit, and willingness to pay, via an online assessment.
By ‘gamifying’ the process, the bank hopes to give young people a new way to get their first credit card.
The score, developed by EFL and marketed by Silicon Valley analytics firm FICO, uses an interactive online assessment to evaluate an individual’s credit risk.
“We are using the EFL score to give young people a new way to get their first credit card,” said Sergey Khotimskiy, deputy CEO at Sovcombank, a universal bank with more than two million customers.
“Moving forward, we intend to use the score to rate the risk of people who don’t have a FICO Score because they are new to credit, and so don’t have a credit history to score.
“This is an innovative way for us to grow our market.”
Unlike the FICO® Score in Russia – which scores credit information from the National Bureau of Credit Histories (NBKI), Russia’s leading credit bureau – the EFL Score gathers applicant-contributed data in an interactive online survey to assess a person’s attitudes toward credit and willingness to pay.
EFL’s psychometric scoring and behavioural data analysis technology was born out of more than a decade of empirical research, initially at Harvard, and validated by over a billion dollars of lending across the world.
Jim Wehmann, executive vice president of Scores at FICO said: “EFL uses a very different method from FICO, but the goal is the same, to instantly and reliably determine a person’s likelihood of repaying credit.
“It’s an incredibly useful tool to use when there isn’t sufficient data to calculate a FICO Score, and that’s the case for around 3 billion credit ‘invisibles’ around the world.”
Jared Miller, CEO at EFL, said the score is “perfect” for an organisation like Sovcombank, which wants to build its portfolio among young people who may not have traditional FICO Scores.