A month ago I was among the 5,000 attendees at the LendIt Fintech trade show in San Francisco. LendIt is one of the larger fintech events around, making it a good time to take the industry’s pulse. Throughout the two days, I heard a lot about fintech’s future: the adoption of blockchain, improving customer experience, using artificial intelligence (AI) to power all sorts of lending activities.

But the biggest theme reverberating across the Moscone Center’s busy aisles was data. Consumers are generating rising volumes of it while companies are collecting more of it to find their business edge. One important trend is the rise of “consumer-permissioned” credit scores that encourage consumers to give credit bureaus a peek at their checking and savings accounts, or link up their cell phone and utility payment history on the assumption that more data will help them improve their credit scores.

Source: forbes.com
Author: Douglas Merrill