New Product Uses Esri Data and Geocoding to Expand Financial Services to Underserved Markets
MO Technologies, which offers financial technology (fintech) companies a more complete view of a person’s creditworthiness through location intelligence, has adopted Esri’s ArcGIS Platform to provide the precise, frequently updated data at the core of MO’s tools used to complement traditional credit scoring models.
“It’s important to account for evolving characteristics in a location where a credit applicant lives. Placing data in a geographic context offers valuable insights and crucial understanding.”
Understanding that the financial life of a person doesn’t always fit the mold used by credit scoring bureaus and banks, leaders at MO believe knowing more about where a person lives and works can help fill in gaps and warrant extending credit to some of the hundreds of millions of people left out of the financial system.
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“Situations can change dramatically, as we’ve seen in the last two years,” said Javier Díaz-Cely, MO’s chief analytics officer. “It’s important to account for evolving characteristics in a location where a credit applicant lives. Placing data in a geographic context offers valuable insights and crucial understanding.”
Central to MO’s software as a solution (SaaS) offerings—including its latest product, MO Geo—is reliable information from Esri, the global leader in location intelligence. By adopting ArcGIS Platform, Esri’s platform as a service (PaaS), MO unlocked access to Esri’s rich demographic data and precision geocoding services.
“We’re excited MO turned to ArcGIS Platform when the company needed reliable data and geocoding,” said David Cardella, Esri product manager for developer technologies. “By offering flexible solutions, we allow our customers to focus on what they do best.”
MO uses data about housing prices, the cost of food, access to transportation and public utilities, and more, to create models that can help estimate what a person’s income or financial risk might be. MO’s team discovered that in Argentina, for example, the distance between a person’s home and an ATM is a significant factor. In Mexico, it is important to consider home prices and how many grocery stores are in an applicant’s vicinity.
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MO Geo, the company’s recently launched stand-alone product, provides fintechs and other financial institutions with geographical indexes—developed through machine learning—that can be used as inputs to complement traditional models. The product also works in tandem with MO Score, the company’s own credit scoring platform.
Beyond financial institutions, the company has worked with businesses in the gig economy as well as consumer product goods manufacturers that wanted to extend credit to small merchants with little financial history.
Based in Bogotá, Colombia, MO has focused its work so far in the Latin America and Caribbean regions. The company’s technology has already played a role in one million credit assessments. A free version of the MO Geo solution is being made available in the US. The company is expanding the product’s availability to Mexico, Colombia, and the rest of the Latin America and Caribbean regions.
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