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The things we do: How your mobile phone records can predict your creditworthiness

Roxanne Bauer's picture

Jinotega, NicaraguaRisk is a financial term that can mean life or death for a budding entrepreneur.  Many entrepreneurs need to take out loans from banks in order to have enough money to start their businesses.  Banks, though, need to be able to reliably determine which of these potential entrepreneurs will repay the loans and which will default. In developed countries this is usually accomplished through credit reports, which contain an individual’s credit history as reported to a credit bureau by lenders. This system, however, can be problematic in developing countries where many people do not have bank accounts, don’t interact frequently with formal institutions, or are paid informally in cash.  As a result, banks often lack verifiable information on the probability that a loan applicant will be successful. 

Interestingly, one set of data that is available in most countries is mobile phone records.  By the end of 2015, there will be more than 7 billion mobile cellular subscriptions, with a penetration rate of 97%, up from 738 million in 2000.  Due to the incredible market saturation of mobile phones and the ability of mobile phone operators to keep records of call activity (even with prepaid plans), operator records can provide rich information about individual behavior and social networks.  For example, phone records indicate whether or not an individual keeps their balance top-upped so that they can make calls in case of an emergency, how many people they call during the day, how long their calls last, and so on.

Daniel Björkegren, an economist at Brown University and Darrell Grissen of the Entrepreneurial Finance Lab (EFL) wondered whether these phone records could reveal insights into an individual’s behaviors that could be applied elsewhere- specifically whether this information could determine an individual’s creditworthiness.