Kreditech, which was launched last year (see our report of November 2012) to provide small loans to consumers is said to be breaking into the small business lending market.
At this point in time little is known about the announced B2B offering, except that it will launch internationally early in 2013 and will allow retailers (e.g. banks, leasing companies, e-commerce stores) to access parts or all of Kreditech’s data with “minimal technical setup and no contracts or minimum durations”. Since Kreditech charges an exorbitant interest rate to consumers (10% – 30% for a 30 day loan) one wonders whether cash starved small businesses will be tempted to utilize the offer.
Kreditech, uses in-house Big Data and analytics technology to assess creditworthiness of borrowers, thus circumventing traditional information sources such as credit bureaus or credit information suppliers. Kreditech describes itself as a ‘Scoring as a Service’, deploys technology that claims to process over 8,000 data points in real-time — made up of things like location data, social graph data, web analytics, e-commerce behavior, and device data — to give consumers a credit score which it then sells on to retailers. The Hamburg-headquartered company has announced that it’s raised a further $4 million in funding from Blumberg Capital, the management of an unnamed German investment bank, and the previous backer Point Nine Capital.
Source: Techcrunch.com
