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Nova Credit, a US fintech startup that unlocks credit histories for immigrants, has launched in the UK.
Nova Credit tackles the problem that immigrants have when they arrive in a new country – that their credit history is stopped at the border.
The Nova Passport capability pulls newcomers’ established credit data from their country of origin and converts it into an equivalent score and report suitable for use by lenders and financial services providers in their new host country.
Since launching in 2016, Nova Credit has developed partnerships with credit bureaus in over 20 countries globally to take their data and standardise it into a format readily accepted by lenders and financial services providers. To date, the company has helped unlock consumer-permissioned access to over two billion credit profiles.
Collin Galster, VP international at Nova Credit & director of Nova Credit UK, comments: “Millions of immigrants cross borders every year to work, study and establish new lives for themselves and their families. In doing so, they leave years of credit history behind them, ‘stuck’ in the countries they’ve left. The majority of these individuals are creditworthy, yet underserved. Without access to their past credit history, lenders have no choice but to automatically decline their applications for new finance.”
Of the 10 million immigrants living in the UK today, 3.5 million are relative newcomers who have little or no UK credit history but who, based on the historic credit data in their country of origin, could be categorised by UK lenders as creditworthy borrowers.
From its UK base, the startup intends to build partnerships with more credit bureaus throughout Europe and the rest of the world, particularly in regions where UK lenders’ demand for cross-border access to credit data is high.
Nicky Goulimis, Nova Credit co-founder & executive director of Nova Credit UK, states: “Until Nova Credit, there’s been no standardised way for lenders to communicate with credit bureaus around the world. In a world where so much is instinctively interconnected and internationally available with one-click ease, Nova Credit is creating a new world order for global credit data management that makes relocating between countries more frictionless than ever.”
Financial Services
