Turtle Mountain Band is first customer of subprime data company

Thursday, July 5, 2012  

The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in North Dakota is the first customer of a new company that provides data to subprime lenders, The New York Times reports.

The tribe owns Spotloan, a national lending service. The company is using data from ZestFinance to determine who is worthy of a loan.

“All the lenders are data poor," Douglas Merrill, a co-founder of ZestFinance, told the Times. “We hope we can make them data rich, insight rich.”

Get the Story:
Bits: Big Data for the Poor (The New York Times 7/5)

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