Banks Determine Creditworthiness From Calling and Location Data
The Cambridge, Massachusetts firm Cignifi is making yet another small step on behalf of the practice of demographic profiling. Marketed towards banks in developing nations where a prevalence of cash transactions challenges conventional means of assessing credit risk, Cignifi’s innovative modeling software studies the time of day, duration, and even location of a cellphone user’s calls to to determine, with supposedly remarkable accuracy, the degree of risk involved in extending a line of credit.