IMSS data will help Mexicans access credit

“It may be that you traditionally approve only 30% of those who ask you for credit, when you are letting go of some clients who are surely very good,” said Luis Pineda, CEO of Now, in an interview after presenting the secured credit card.

Pineda noted that 100,000 credit card applications are rejected every month due to insufficient information on the applicants. But after the launch of the secured credit card the bank seeks to have more information that allows it to make better evaluations of customers.

Belvo is a company that helps financial companies access and process financial data, as well as initiate payments from their users’ accounts. It provides connections with more than 60 financial institutions through its platform in Mexico, Brazil and Colombia and already works with more than 150 clients.

“We already have a critical mass of information that is gold dust, plus we have a risk team that I believe is the most sophisticated in the banking system in Mexico that has the availability to try new things, has the ambition and appetite for risk, and has cutting-edge technological tools such as machine learning,” he added.

The executive said that there was a time when the bank, as an experiment, approved 100% of the credit applications that came to it and that even though there may have been “delinquent” clients in that universe, the experiment will have been worthwhile in order to analyze the information.

“I’m investing in capturing information, so you bring more information, you study it, you analyze it, you effectively lose money, but the richness of the information allows you to feed your algorithm, your traditional model,” he added.