FICO Helps Millions of Ukrainian Refugees Get Access to Credit

FICO partners with Ukrainian credit bureau to launch innovative credit score for Ukrainian refugees in Poland

Global analytics software leader FICO, recognized as a global leader in credit scoring analytics, has launched an innovative FICO^® Score as part of an effort aimed at helping Ukrainian refugees get credit. This initiative is part of FICO’s long-standing commitment to financial inclusion, supporting an inclusive lending ecosystem, and developing innovative solutions to enable consumers to responsibly get access to credit.

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(Graphic: FICO)

In alliance with FICO and Poland’s Biuro Informacji Kredytowej (BIK), the Ukrainian Bureau of Credit Histories (UBCH) will be able to provide a FICO^® Score that lenders can use when offering credit to the estimated 6 million displaced Ukrainians settling in Europe. This credit score, based on UBCH data, will be available first to Polish lenders looking to meet the needs of the roughly 2 million Ukrainian nationals who have relocated to Poland since the war began. The FICO^® Score is the standard measure of consumer risk and has been made available in over 40 countries to date, improving risk management, credit access, and transparency.

The project was made possible when three entities — the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group; BIK, the only credit bureau in Poland; and UBCH, Ukraine’s largest credit reporting agency — established a secure cross-border data corridor to carry credit data between Ukraine and Poland. FICO leveraged its advanced predictive analytics model to create a FICO^® Score based on UBCH data, which scores the UBCH data, giving lenders a forward-looking assessment of an individual’s credit risk based on their available credit history.

“For the millions of Ukrainians displaced by the war, getting credit is a challenge,” said Julie May, vice president of Scores at FICO. “Lenders rely on credit histories and credit scores based on those histories to make decisions, which this initiative provides. FICO undertook this humanitarian effort with local partners to help ease the burden on Ukrainians by enabling a path toward accessing the credit they need. Access to credit provides an opportunity to give financial independence to refugees so they can get loans, apply for credit cards, buy a car or home, or fund businesses.”

FICO plans to roll out the FICO^® Score based on UBCH data through BIK and UBCH to Poland and other countries in the region that have access to a data corridor.

“Providing access to credit for Ukrainian refugees displaced through the war in Ukraine is a fundamental obligation for us,” said Mariusz Cholewa, CEO of BIK and president of the European credit bureau association at ACCIS. “Supporting citizens as they settle improves their quality of life at a time when they have already been subject to upheaval and trauma. For us, this is not a commercial operation but a humanitarian effort to ease the burden.”

“We hope to boost credit access and economic resilience for displaced Ukrainians during the ongoing war with the deployment of the FICO Score,” said Bohdan Pshenychnyi, director at UBCH. “Providing credit histories to lenders in other countries is the right thing to do so that Ukrainians can benefit from their positive credit history earned at home and can qualify for loans. As the leader in credit scoring, FICO is the only partner who can provide the trusted solution we need.”

Making Credit More Accessible and Affordable

Enabling access to the FICO® Score for Ukrainian refugees is just one way that FICO works to increase credit access globally:

• As part of its Financial Inclusion Initiative, FICO offers the FICO^® Score for International Markets. FICO Scores have been made available in more than 40 countries across five continents.
• Innovative solutions developed by the FICO^® Scores team can enable credit access for an estimated 1.3 billion consumers globally using alternative data.
• FICO also partners with innovative firms such as Belvo in Brazil, to enable use of Open Banking data and FICO analytics to score more consumers.

“Access to credit is incredibly important for individuals to achieve their financial dreams, as well as for the economy,” May said. “However, responsible lending depends on sound risk management. By using our leadership in predictive analytics to provide robust risk tools, we help lenders serve more people while giving consumers more options to access credit to improve their financial health.”

About FICO

FICO (NYSE: FICO) powers decisions that help people and businesses around the world prosper. Founded in 1956, the company is a pioneer in the use of predictive analytics and data science to improve operational decisions. FICO holds more than 220 US and foreign patents on technologies that increase profitability, customer satisfaction and growth for businesses in financial services, insurance, telecommunications, health care, retail and many other industries. Using FICO solutions, businesses in nearly 120 countries do everything from protecting 2.6 billion payment cards from fraud, to improving financial inclusion, to increasing supply chain resiliency. The FICO® Score, used by 90% of top US lenders, is the standard measure of consumer credit risk in the US and has been made available in over 40 other countries, improving risk management, credit access and transparency. Learn more at www.fico.com.

About BIK

Biuro Informacji Kredytowej S.A. (Credit Information Bureau) - supports the security of financial institutions and their clients by providing a safe system for exchanging credit and economic information and innovative anti-fraud solutions. As the only credit information agency in Poland, through the website www.bik.pl and the Moj BIK mobile application, it enables individual clients to monitor their own credit history and warns against credit fraud attempts via BIK Alerts. The anti-fraud solutions in BIK portfolio systems are: BIK Anti-Fraud Platform, Cyber Fraud Detection Platform and new currently developed Behavioural Biometrics Platform. BIK collects and provides data on the credit history of individual customers and entrepreneurs from the entire credit market, as well as data from the area of non-bank loans. The BIK database contains information on 164 million accounts belonging to 25 million individual customers and 1.4 million companies, including 845 thousand micro-entrepreneurs running a business. BIK has the highest competences in the field of data science, market analysis and modern technologies. It combines the features of a modern technology company with the attributes of a public trust institution. BIK actively participates in the work of ACCIS, which represents the largest group of organisations responsibly managing data to assess the financial credibility of consumers and businesses in the world.

Credit Information Bureau (Biuro Informacji Kredytowej S.A.) together with the Economic Information Bureau InfoMonitor (Biuro Informacji Gospodarczej InfoMonitor S.A.) and Digital Fingerprints (Digital Fingerprints S.A.) are part of the BIK Group. Learn more at https://en.bik.pl/about-us.

About the Ukrainian Bureau of Credit Histories Ltd. (UBCH)

UBCH is a highly technological bureau with the largest database of credit histories in Ukraine. The bureau’s database contains information on more than 25 million borrowers – both individuals and legal entities. The company’s innovative solutions help improve decision-making processes, reduce financial risks, and increase safety levels for all participants of the financial market. The bureau collects and analyzes information that constitutes each credit history, aggregates data from public registers and other open sources, and also develops and provides predictive analytics and fraud prevention services. The bureau’s activity is aimed at strengthening mutual trust and respect between borrower and lender, with an important component being the social focus. In cooperation with the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the bureau implements a comprehensive project to improve the level of financial literacy among Ukrainians, which includes educational projects for the general population. UBCH is a full member and co-founder of the ALE “Association of Credit Information Providers in Eurasia”, established on October 23, 2018 to promote the development of credit reporting in Eurasia. For more information, visit www.ubki.ua.

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FICO has launched an innovative FICO® Score as part of an effort aimed at helping Ukrainian refugees access credit.