Most companies that take on credit risk—financial institutions, credit unions, fintech companies, digital banks, payment providers, or retailers with their own financial operations—make credit decisions based on a combination of credit bureau scores and manual review. Simple rules filter out the most obvious cases right at the outset—the so-called “high-risk” cases.
Next, the credit score—whether from a credit bureau or a proprietary model—makes the next selection. Finally, a team of analysts steps in for cases that the scoring model cannot decide with certainty. The credit bureau’s scoring model accounts for most of the market’s delinquencies and fulfills this role well: it provides a view of the entire market. However, it was trained on the general population, not on each creditor’s specific database, so it does not, on its own, capture the behavior of the niche associated with each transaction.
This has two effects at the same time: good payers are rejected, and bad payers are approved without the model realizing it.
That is why the 4kst Customized Credit Score does not seek to replace the credit bureau, but rather to supplement it with exactly what the bureau cannot see on its own: the client’s own portfolio, risk appetite, and the specific behavior of that business.
Manual analysis compensates for some of this inaccuracy, but at the cost of rising fixed costs and a decision-making process that can cost the sale. And even when a company moves to its own customized model, the challenge simply takes on a different form—it doesn’t disappear: every static model becomes outdated as soon as it goes into production, and recalibration takes weeks or months.