Stefan Mileschin

Credit score companies are starting to use data gathered from Facebook to determine how much cash finance companies should loan you.

According to CNN, a handful of tech startups are using social data to determine the risk of lending to people who have a difficult time accessing credit.

Normally companies ignore such types which might be a good credit risk because they don't have credit scores.

But apparently financial lending companies are becoming interested in how social connections can be a good indicator of a person's creditworthiness.

One outfit, Lenddo, looks to see if you're friends on Facebook with someone who was late paying back a loan. If so, then that harms your score.

If you only interact with the person a couple of times it probably will not matter so much, but if you talk to the person every day it could really do your finances some harm.

Jeff Stewart, a co-founder and CEO of Lenddo said that humans are really good at knowing who is trustworthy and reliable in their community and this can now be measured by computers.

A German company called Kreditech says that it uses up to 8,000 data points when assessing an application for a loan.

It uses data from Facebook, eBay or Amazon accounts and gathers information based on how customers fill out the online application.

http://news.techeye.net/business/cre...rn-to-facebook