These are working theses, not generic commentary, each written up as a paper. Three are published; the fourth follows before the end of the year.
A bureau score’s measured performance is a property of the test it was measured in, not only of the score. Measured the way a lender actually uses it — forward, on the population that applies, over the horizon the exposure runs — the same score is answering a harder question, and answers it less well.
Paper I sets out why, and the four levels a credit function can run to measure the score on its own book.
Read the paper →Cash flow is not a better bureau. It is a different observation of the same customer, and the value is in what the two together support that neither supports alone. The rails exist in both markets; coverage does not yet follow.
Paper II sets out what the evidence shows, what it does not, and the tests that show whether it changes decisions on a Gulf book.
Read the paper →Job loss is among the best-evidenced causes of consumer default. In the Gulf it reaches beyond income, and it arrives through the employer, often for many borrowers at once.
EMPLOYER → INCOME → RESIDENCY → REPAYMENT
Most lenders manage the employer at the door. Paper III argues the value lies after it.
Read the paper →Most lenders are better at originating customers than at managing them continuously — line management, activation, retention, repricing, collections treatment, customer-level intervention.
The usual objection is that affordability and regulatory constraints limit what can be done. They do. But a constraint on the size of an intervention is not a constraint on the quality of its targeting, and a large amount of permitted opportunity is simply going unmanaged.