What is the name of your organization?
Giving Credit
What is the name of your solution?
Giving Credit
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Credit reporting agency for community finance
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Philadelphia, PA, USA
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
United States
What type of organization is your solution team?
Hybrid of for-profit and nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
45 million people in the United States are credit invisible. Latinos and people who are Black are twice as likely to face mainstream credit exclusion than people who are white. Credit scores are used to justify credit exclusion or high-interest debt for subsets of the population, despite their relatively poor ability to predict loan default.
It wasn’t always like this. Throughout the mid-twentieth century, credit reporting agencies focused on the character of potential borrowers. That all changed with algorithmic credit models that segmented consumers into groups, stripping individuality and codifying bias.
Despite mainstream credit exclusion, no person is actually invisible. Our friends, family, neighbors, and coworkers know us. They know our character, they know if we are creditworthy. That is why financially excluded people engage in the oldest form of banking, lending, and borrowing with people they trust.
U.S. households hold as much as $200B in peer-to-peer debt, one-fifth the value of credit card debt. 90% of low-to-moderate income individuals lend and borrow with friends and family. People do not need to prove their creditworthiness. They prove it every day when they engage in community finance. They deserve a credit reporting system that sees them for who they are.
What is your solution?
Giving Credit is the credit reporting agency for the $200B community finance market. We aggregate peer-lending transactions in trusted social networks and leverage social underwriting to expand access to mainstream credit. Our mobile app facilitates and rewards peer lending in financially excluded communities and collects and aggregates community finance data. Our character-based credit reports elevate character over wealth or race. We partner with financial institutions that use our platform and data to access new customers and qualify people for wealth-building credit products at affordable interest rates.
Users join Giving Credit to build their social credit network and line, track and make peer loans to their trusted social network, build an alternative credit report to gain access to better mainstream credit products, and receive cash back rewards for supporting their community. We partner with social impact organizations, employers and financial institutions who offer Giving Credit as a financial wellness benefit to their membership community. Additionally, they can offer rewards or loan loss insurance funds, provide 0% interest loans and use our credit report to augment their underwriting process.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Giving Credit is designed for financially excluded communities. In the United States, where Giving Credit is located, low-income communities of color face the highest degree of financial exclusion and exploitation. There are 45 million people in the U.S. who are credit invisible, and payday lenders extract $9.1B annually. Black and Latinx households are twice as likely to be unbanked than White households. Blacks pay twice what Whites pay in loan interest and bank fees every year. Latinx borrowers pay 1.4 times more.
Faced with financial exclusion, people engage in community finance. 90% of low-to-moderate income individuals borrow from their friends and family, showing their credit reliability every day. Yet, our exclusionary mainstream credit system does not recognize these financial transactions.
We are on a mission to change that. We must redesign the credit system and create wealth-building opportunities for all by recognizing peer lending and borrowing as a true financial system. We achieve this by underwriting mainstream financial products with peer lending data and developing integrated financial products across the financial systems: mainstream and community.
