This Wall Street Journal piece looks at the growing trend of lenders looking at applicants’ social media presence to help determine creditworthiness and get a fuller picture of who the applicants are. Did you tell the bank you graduated from Harvard but laugh on your Facebook page about how you didn’t waste your time in college? Did you tell the loan officer you’ve had two jobs over the past 10 years but your LinkedIn page says you’ve had five? No surprise — regulators are concerned this is unfair.
Regulators are watching the trend and trying to determine whether to police financial institutions’ use of online data in credit scoring, officials say. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says it is aware that some businesses are exploring how to use social media to inform credit decisions. And the Federal Trade Commission will host a series of seminars this spring on emerging consumer-privacy issues, including the use of alternative scoring.
At Movencorp Inc., a mobile-only bank that does business as Moven, customers can link up social-media accounts such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to learn about their own financial behavior and make payments to friends. The company plans to offer loans and social-media activity will be one factor used in lending decisions, said Alex Sion, president of New York-based Moven, which became available to consumers in May 2013.
“The data we have on customers via social networks says more about them than their FICO,” Mr. Sion said, referring to the three-digit credit score widely used to estimate risk. “You can make credit decisions based not on a faceless score, but on who you know.”
I have a simple solution: don’t lie.
With that settled, we can move on to being concerned about more potential regulation from the behemoth new federal regulator, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
