CredoLab raises US$ 7 million in its Series A round led by GBG

By Edil Corneille

Singaporean company CredoLab has raised US$ 7 million in its Series A investment round led by Chester-based GBG, a global identity verification solutions provider. CredoLab is a developer of bank-grade digital risk scorecards. This FinTech company was officially acknowledged by the Financial Services Authority (OJK) in January as a provider of financial technology services in Indonesia.

Established in Singapore in 2016, CredoLab is on a mission to make credit available to all. It is said to have powered over US$ 2 billion in loans to date using technology to analyse over 1 trillion data points across 21 countries. The FinTech develops digital scorecards for any business that needs to make better risk decisions such as banks, lenders, e-commerce, travel, ride hailing, e-wallets, insurance, and retail companies from the best alternative data source: privacy-consented and permissioned, smartphone and web behavioural data.

In June, GBG and CredoLab announced a collaboration entailing the assessment of the creditworthiness of an applicant including those of the unbanked and underbanked.

Built on over 22 million credit applications across more than 70 lending partners, CredoLab’s artificial intelligence-based algorithm crunches millions of features to find the most predictive micro-behavioural patterns, before converting them into risk scores. Matching the customer’s device patterns to these scores enables any business to make the most granular risk assessments possible of their prospective customers, even in the absence of credit bureau scores.

CredoLab also addresses the lack of predictive data for underwriting and fraud detection purposes in emerging and developed countries alike. Supported by the increasing penetration of smartphones and the ongoing shift from physical transactions to digital ones, CredoLab provides a behavioural risk score built on data that supplements existing credit risk models to facilitate the approval of ‘thin file’ customers including millennials, small business owners, new-to-credit and new-to-bank individuals. To date, CredoLab has maintained its predictive power even in the presence of payment holidays.

As previously announced, GBG has entered into a commercial partnership with CredoLab to accelerate its delivery of customer solutions by leveraging GBG’s Instinct digital risk management and intelligence platform. With GBG Instinct, banks, lenders, and mobile wallets can leverage an orchestration layer to perform multiple data callouts including CredoLab’s cloud service. The partnership has already seen an uplift in digital scorecard predictiveness by up to 40 percent, a drop in the cost of risk by up to 22 percent, and an increase in approval rates of up to 32 percent. The partnership forms part of GBG’s continued commitment to offering end-to-end digital fraud and compliance solutions for any business looking to onboard and transact with their customers quickly, safely, and securely.