Big Data-Driven Credit And Loans Startup Kreditech Raises $15M In Debt To Expand

Established retail banks around the world have bit of a problem. There are a whole bunch of new banking players that want to disrupt parts of their business, such as Wonga, Lenddo, Kueski and many others. It’s like being eaten by piranhas. Now Kreditech is poised to be one of those players to really capitalise on this historic shift. Claiming to want to become “The Amazon for Consumer Finance”, the founders are Sebastian Diemer, Alexander Graubner-Müller and Felix Haas – the former Amiando founder.

Kreditech has a micro-loans product for consumers and, on the back-end, a credit rating service for enterprise customers. So, two bites of the cherry which help each-other. It’s now secured $15 million in debt financing from Kreos Capital. This is the third extension after the initial $5M loan in September 2013. This will finance its consumer lending activities in Poland, Spain, Czech Republic, Russia and Mexico and it will expand to Australia and other markets, including Peru and Brazil, during 2014. The startup raised $4 million in venture funding in 2012.

Its credit scoring service claims to process over 8,000 data points in real-time (location, social graph, e-commerce behaviour etc) to generate a credit score for a consumer which it then sells on to retailers. The company says it has a technology which means they don’t require any external credit bureau data in their risk model, because they do identification, fraud detection and scoring decisions based on globally available data sources such as social networks and e-commerce records. That means they can move fast into emerging markets.

It’s now diversifying from short-term microloans to consumer-focused finance products, such as unsecured installment loans, credit cards and other products that will be launched soon.