We started Nordigen in 2016 with a simple idea: to help lenders approve more creditworthy customers. From distance, the industry seemed to be already quite saturated with powerful analytics tools, but we saw a gap in the foundations — lenders everywhere were still struggling to get the data that they require to understand how creditworthy a loan applicant is. To fill this gap, we explored the possibilities of account data and open banking to provide banks and alternative lenders with the insights they lacked to make better lending decisions. Simply put: we built an analytics layer on top of raw account data that helped lenders to automate income verification and check other risk-critical factors (active liabilities, spending behaviour, etc.).
Our approach proved to work. We demonstrated that algorithms can outperform humans when working with bank statement data. We proved that account data is more predictive than credit bureau reports. We validated that the problem we’re solving is equally painful in Europe as it is in Brazil, Australia and New Zealand — and that it’s equally painful for large banks as well as small non-bank lenders.
All this leads us to the present day. We believe that the world needs an alternative to traditional credit bureaus. Credit bureaus play an important role in building trust between banks and customers, but we believe they are not scalable enough. Only 30% of the global population has any records at a credit bureau, while at least 2x more people have a bank account or a mobile wallet that contains all the information necessary to properly evaluate their financial health. The sooner lenders will have a scalable way to verify an individual’s creditworthiness using the data that is easily available, the sooner creditworthy customers everywhere will get access to affordable credit.
With this in mind, we’re excited to announce a new investment of €700,000 from Seedcamp and Inventure, to follow the last year’s investment of €150,000 from Change Ventures. The new investment will help us accelerate our mission to help banks and lenders everywhere use account data in credit decisions. To support the mission, we’re building the first global alternative to credit bureaus. Not a better credit bureau, but something else completely.
We have a long way ahead, but we have all the right tools and a great team to make sure the mission is a success.
About Nordigen
Nordigen is a global account data analytics solution helping banks and lenders improve the speed and accuracy of their credit decisions. Supported across 17 countries.
www.nordigen.com
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