Why Crivo Was Nominated for the Best International Crunchie and How It's Changing Brazil (TCTV)

No doubt, the International category at the Crunchies usually gets the most head-scratching here in the TechCrunch offices and in the auditorium. And truth be told, if we’re picking the best candidates it probably should. The most transformational International companies aren’t building things for the US market that we might have heard of; they’re building things that are transforming their own home markets. And in countries like China, India, Indonesia, Russia and Brazil– those domestic markets are huge.

One of my favorite nominees this year is called Crivo, and it’s revolutionizing the credit markets in Brazil, opening up opportunities for car loans and house loans for the growing middle class for the first time. Because positive credit incidents– i.e. paying your credit card on time every month for ten years or buying a $1 million house– are considered private information that can’t be legally shared, banks are incredibly conservative when it comes to lending money. Crivo scours digital databases for anything else that could tell them whether you are a good credit risk– even whether you lied about your phone number. The results are returned within three seconds, giving lenders more information then they’ve ever had before.

It’s taken a long time to build this companies, but today most of the banks and insurance companies in Brazil use it. Crivo has been in talks with several Valley venture firms about raising some money to expand globally.

Crivo’s co-founder Daniel Turini came to San Francisco to attend the Crunchies, so we asked him to stop by the studio and tell us a bit more about this unknown company that’s making a huge difference in the lives of everyday Brazilians. And since it was his first trip to the United States, we asked him what he enjoyed most. (The answer may get him mocked back home.)