SMEs are the backbone of most economies and employ approximately 60 percent of the working population in OECD countries. However, these businesses often struggle the most to access financing, oftentimes, relying on friends and family to help them flourish and thrive by lending money when others do not. We have created Trust·u to offer a solution to this. Trust·u is an internal venturing effort from BBVA, positioned to address innovation opportunities in an agile manner by mimicking startups. We utilize a digital platform to enable rapid on-boarding and underwriting, combining social elements with financial data, to grant small businesses access to financing based on a new risk assessment model, which takes full advantage of ML techniques and new data sources.
Redefining Small Business Lending through ML and Social Physics.