Many home mortgage loan lenders have developed automated processes for lending decisions and these include both assessment of credit scoring and now consumer profiling. It may be that a solicitor living in London, fairs better than one living in Swansea, but advanced consumer metrics now allow certain lenders to look at the creditworthiness of a solicitor aged 30, with 2 dependants, twins aged 5, working for 7 years, against other people’s creditworthiness of the same factors. You may be okay, but generally other applicants in the legal profession, in your area with kids, aged 30 - may not!
There appears good evidence that social and economic personal profiling is a useful objective tool upon which to base lending credit decisions, but new research from confused.com, takes profiling to a whole new level.
They have found that men with the name Brian appear to have the best credit files, whilst Helen’s top the charts for women. Daniels have the worst profiles while Lisas fair less. As for surnames, people with the last name Edwards on average have the best credit profile. The surname with the lowest average is Thompson.
The credit file is a record of a person’s credit history as reported by credit providers and this does not only apply to banks, loan companies and credit cards, but also to the main utility companies and mobile phone providers. The concern for many UK customers as reported on BBC Watchdog last night is that mobile companies can default clients for non-payment of quite excessive mobile phone bills, even when their phone was stolen or used fraudulently by a third party.
