When building a lending model, transaction data quality varies. Consistent spending on necessities signals financial stability far more effectively than discretionary, emotional purchases like in-game items, which can be misleading indicators of financial health.

Companies like Optasia leverage mobile phone usage data from telecom partners to provide small loans to millions of unbanked individuals. This model of financial inclusion has created highly valuable "unicorn" companies on the continent.

By eliminating outdated constraints like the six-month activity rule and incorporating time-series data and alternative inputs like rent payments, modern credit scoring models can assess millions of creditworthy individuals, such as military personnel or young people, who were previously unscorable.

Kaspi has a high recovery rate on defaulted unsecured loans because its app is vital for daily life (payments, taxes, etc.). Borrowers have a powerful incentive to repay to avoid losing access, creating a unique, non-collateral form of security.

Grab leverages its rich transaction data—like a merchant's daily cash flow or a driver's income—to create proprietary credit scores. This allows it to safely underwrite loans for unbanked individuals and small businesses, a segment traditional banks avoid due to a lack of data.

India's nationwide Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), like the UPI payments system, generates vast transactional data for populations previously outside the formal economy. An AI overlay on this data can assess creditworthiness for small vendors, solving a major barrier to financial inclusion and unlocking economic opportunity.

In the 80s, credit was binary: a high score got a card, a low score got nothing. Capital One pioneered an "information-based strategy," using data to test and price risk for consumers just below the traditional cutoff, effectively creating the modern data-driven lending model.

In traditional finance, data providers (S&P) and ratings agencies (Moody's) are separate, high-headcount businesses. The combination of transparent on-chain data and AI allows a single firm to perform these functions instantly and cheaply, threatening to consolidate this fragmented, multi-hundred-billion-dollar market.

Kaspi's journey from a conventional retail bank to a dominant tech super app in Kazakhstan was catalyzed by its pre-existing banking license—a valuable and difficult-to-obtain asset in a developing financial market that gave it a unique starting advantage.