I haven't missed a payment for 20 years, but I also don't charge my phone on weekends and never answer a call from a number I don't recognize... so including lifestyle metrics tends to worry me. If you were to look at my lifestyle superficially I'd likely appear high-risk... social engineering against anyone outside the norm scares me.
Technically someone can have complete ability to pay back their credit card debt, yet they might miss a credit card payment (like I did last year because I was out of the country due to a personal reason), yet that is counted against me.
The idea behind these criterion isn't to perfectly capture the creditworthiness of the applicant rather to give a general idea of their creditworthiness.
The aim is to be better than nothing. Also different cultural aspects play role in this too. For instance in West (at least in America) a lot of people don't take calls from unknown numbers (unless your phone is for professional use), whereas in other countries like India, taking calls from unknown number isn't an issue.
While sure you could pay it because you had the money, not paying it is still bad and what you did should count against you.
I am not trying to be mean. But that is sort of how it has work. Think about it ... Let's say 50% of a creditor's debtors failed to pay on time -- while 100% of those who failed technically had the money? This would be devastating to the creditor as they would miss their payments and make them look bad and potentially prevent them from having the ability to lend money out in the future.
So on some level its not just about the ability to pay, its about the diligence. A lackadaisical debtor can be just as bad as a broke debtor. Not that I am calling you lackadaisical.
As you sort of pointed out - creditworthiness is not just the ability to pay, it's the predictability to actually pay.
To prevent this on my end I always run my bank accounts with a few months of cash forward so I can set my credit accounts to auto pay a minimum or in some cases full balance. Carrying debt is not something I really want to do.
>The idea behind these criterion isn't to perfectly capture the creditworthiness of the applicant rather to give a general idea of their creditworthiness.
That's the thing though, based on this article these signals for credit-worthiness would actually be damaging for me despite an otherwise perfect credit history. I take issue with broadening the scope based on societal norms.
If these are used to fill in a non-existent credit history that's one thing — but as factors in an already existing credit history they feel a bit troubling.
> Technically someone can have complete ability to pay back their credit card debt, yet they might miss a credit card payment (like I did last year because I was out of the country due to a personal reason), yet that is counted against me.
I am not sure if you have this capability but have you tried auto-paying the minimum balance?
But they are also unpredictable and in the same bucket with those trying to hide something. Companies might even publicly announce punishing those people to make them join the surveilance.
I always hear that everyone invest in real state (even in the middle of nowhere) because nobody is allowed to lend money in China.
if there are so many people wanting to borrow, where's the huge informal money sharks? I'm guessing there are none or they are even worse than a company that violates your privacy on your phone.
Robosigning just this time literally and on a grander scale. It works well, it is fin-tech (TM) and the technology limits the risk. It will stop working well when the music stops as it always does. Let's just hope the lenders sources of capital are diversified and there is no AIG like entity involved.
It seems quite natural. If you are able to fulfill your obligations you are able to fulfill your obligations. It separates responsible people from the ones that are not.
OTOH, it may become quite lucrative to hack your own phone in order to make the risk assessment company believe that you are low risk!
Answering the phone is not an obligation. Maybe people tend to call when you're in meetings, so you send it to voicemail and you call them back later. Maybe your number got on a spam list somewhere and a bunch of calls are just telemarketing.
When you take thousands of variables and compare them all against each other, you're going to get some spurious correlations.
Yeah, I answer nearly zero calls from numbers that aren't in my contact list. If it's important they can leave a message. If it's a local number I'll google it, and maybe call back even if there's no message and it seems to be someone I want to talk to. Out of state? No way. Most people I know—even my tech-unsavvy parents—have resorted to a similar policy. Multiple spam calls a week—more than calls I actually want to take, certainly—will do that. I'll start treating a ringing phone as necessarily worth paying attention to when junk calls drop to one or two a year, like they were for a while after the Do Not Call registry first came around.
It might be a good filter to find people likely to answer collections calls though, I guess.
I do this ever since I started getting a bunch of spam calls, and it's amazing. The dialer does still "ring" in the sense that it takes over your phone and you need to swipe-to-decline or wait it out, but it won't vibrate/sound except for those in my contacts.
For my particular phone (Droid Turbo) it's here: Notification bar > swipe down again on notification bar > Do not disturb > Priority only > Until you turn this off; More settings > Priority only allows > Calls > From contacts only.
There's even an option down there (sibling to Calls, in the flow above) called "Repeat callers" which, when on, allows a not-in-contacts call to ring if they called twice within 15 minutes. None of my spam callers ever call twice in a row, so it's brilliant for making sure I see (repeat) calls from food delivery people, uber drivers, etc. (although I feel bad that I missed their initial call).
In my opinion, it is dangerous to draw conclusions about responsibility from phone usage only. Even if the conclusions may be correct in 95% of all cases, what about the other five percent? To me, the imagination of a company that does not provide any or only superficial customer support which will not help me in case their algorithms do not match is creepy.
In this case it might not be a big deal because you might be able to find another loan provider but it might become one if this kind of automated scoring gets more common.
I don't think anyone is actually suggesting that. The very first line of the article states that the company in question looks at 1200 different metrics, one of which is phone charge cycle.
The term "charge" only actually appears in the article twice: mostly the headline is clickbait.
