The Entrepreneurial Finance Lab (EFL) is an innovative financial-technology company which employs psychometric and nontraditional applicant data to create credit scores to measure risk and potential among consumers and small businesses. EFL’s alternative scoring technology enables lenders to measure risk among applicants in the most information-scarce environments. EFL, a product of its early Harvard research, has been recognized by the G-20 as one of the most innovative approaches to SME finance globally.
EFL’s partners include over thirty retail, MFI, and SME financial institutions across a dozen countries in Africa, Latin America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.
How It Works:
They empower lenders to seize opportunity and better understand risk, and make better lending decisions.
Borrowers and lenders across the emerging world seek more, better, faster access to finance. Lenders want to serve more applicants but lack many key ingredients for predicting credit risk.
As a result, most lenders serve a very limited pool of applicants.
But their model reveals new dimensions of information about all individuals, whether or not they have credit history and collateral. This uncovers new opportunities both within, and outside, lenders' current portfolios.
New dimensions of information means a more complete and accurate understanding of credit risk. And a more accurate understanding of credit risk means more opportunities for lenders and borrowers alike.
EFL’s scoring has enabled its customers to reduce credit risk, safely increase portfolio size, and decrease costs and time to lend. Hundreds of thousands of individuals and hundreds of millions of dollars have gone through their constantly evolving methodology.
Ever since EFL’s inception in 2006 as a research initiative at the Harvard Center for International Development, they have been committed to advancing research in the fields of behavioral science, psychology, usability and interface design, machine learning, and financial inclusion.
Today, EFL actively collaborates with academic experts whose research can be advanced by the use of EFL data and whose insights EFL can leverage to further develop their product and predictive credit models. EFL values these relationships as an essential avenue to deepening its impact in advancing access to finance in the markets they serve.
