HelloSoda Launches To Predict Your Credit Rating And Potential For Fraud

A new startup thinks it has come up with a platform to deliver a score that predicts a person’s creditworthiness, propensity to commit fraud and a number of other types of intelligence.

HelloSoda was founded by Paul Shepherd and James Blake, ex-head of Global Sales at Call Credit, the UK’s 2nd largest credit reference agency. They’ve hired engineers from Skype and LShift , data scientists from various Universities and received undisclosed backing from as-yet-unnamed Tallinn, Estonia-based investors. Clients so far include lenders and insurers, but also gaming and recruitment companies.

The Manchester-based startup uses Bayesian Belief Network principles to analyse structured data such as the number of Facebook friends someone has, but also creates predictions from unstructured data like blog posts, tweets and interactions between people in social networks. It claims to be able to identify fraudulent social media accounts.

The main competitors are Kreditech and Zest Finance but they themselves are lenders whereas HelloSoda is sold in to existing lenders, gaming companies, insurance companies and HR departments.

Germany’s Kreditech last year raised a $40 million Series B funding round, the largest ever for a German financial services technology company and one of the largest rounds in Germany in 2014. ZestFinance is another, which has raised a total of $112 million so far.

It’s a competitive environment, but if there is one thing companies are increasingly concerned about it’s online fraud, so HelloSoda launches into a pretty fertile market. And by not being a lender itself it will be able to interact with any number of potential customers.