Higher rates for addresses in caps – online lender WeLend reveals how it determines your creditworthiness

If you are looking to take out a loan from online lending platform WeLend to buy the iPhone X, be warned – should you use only upper-case letters when filling out the address field in your application, you could be charged a higher interest rate.

“We actually match how people fill out addresses with the probability of [them] declaring bankruptcy after a certain number of years,” said Simon Loong, the founder and chief executive of WeLab, the Hong Kong company that operates WeLend.

“The probability of [an applicant] declaring bankruptcy is highest when they fill in their address in capital letters,” he said. “We think this could relate to one’s education level. Every interaction we have with a user gives us insight into their choices, background, and this … helps us better understand individuals.”

WeLab gathers hundreds and thousands of data points about its 25 million users in Hong Kong and China, crunching the numbers to determine the creditworthiness of each user using its proprietary big data and artificial intelligence technology.

In Hong Kong, the company relies primarily on a user’s credit history and interaction data. In mainland China, where less than 30 per cent of the population has a credit score, WeLab relies much more on unstructured, mobile data.

This means the company collects a wider variety of information from its users, such as the phone model they use, installed apps, social networks and even how much time they spend talking on the phone.

Yet another observation WeLab has made is that delinquency rates tend to correlate with loan application times – if a user applies for a loan between 1am and 6am, they are more likely to default on a payment than users who apply in the day, Loong said.