The World Bank Features Colendi's Approach to Credit Scoring
Today the World Bank Group and the International Committee on Credit Reporting published their Credit Scoring Approaches Guidelines. The report includes Colendi as a use case for decentralized credit scoring and cites our technical paper.
For our team, this is meaningful because it brings attention to the problem we set out to solve: conventional credit scoring works best for people who already have a formal financial history. Those without bank accounts, credit cards, or previous loans may be economically active and reliable, yet remain difficult for the system to evaluate. A missing credit file is too often treated as evidence of missing creditworthiness.
We built Colendi around a different idea. With a user’s permission, a scoring model can learn from a broader and more current picture: smartphone and telco activity, purchases, transaction patterns, retail relationships, and repayment behavior. These signals do not replace careful risk assessment. They make it possible to begin an assessment where traditional data provides little or nothing.
The World Bank guidelines describe Colendi as combining machine learning, identity checks, alternative data, and blockchain-based infrastructure. Our technical architecture is designed to keep an important boundary intact: the information used to calculate a score should not automatically become information exposed to every lender or network participant. Users authorize access. Sensitive records are encrypted or anonymized. Computation takes place separately from the public ledger, and a lender receives the resulting assessment rather than a copy of a person’s private digital history.
This distinction matters. Financial inclusion cannot be built by asking people to surrender control of their data in exchange for opportunity. A more inclusive credit system must also be a more responsible one—clear about permission, proportionate in the data it uses, and designed to protect the individual behind the score.
The report is not an endorsement of one company or one model. It is evidence that alternative-data credit scoring has become part of a serious global conversation about the future of credit reporting. We are proud that Colendi’s work is included in that conversation, and even more determined to prove that better technology can make access to credit broader, fairer, and safer.