I know this debate has been had many times before but I'm bringing it back up. Just read a news story about kabbage and zestfinance. some takeaways:

"ZestFinance employs a host of untraditional signals — such as whether or not a would-be borrower has read a letter on its website — to determine if someone is credit-worthy."

"One example is ZestFinance, a new style of underwriting company that uses 70,000 data signals and ten parallel machine learning algorithms to assess personal loans."

" The lending firm Kabbage, for instance, taps into data like a company’s UPS activity to assess their financial health — everything from the volume of shipping to the size of the parcels provide signals about how a firm is doing."

"Kabbage is offering more loans than banks to internet-based businesses"

http://gigaom.com/2013/03/20/forget-...-underwriting/

raise your hand if you are looking at more than just fico score and daily ending bank balance.