Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Boston, USA – Quod, Brazil’s newly established positive credit bureau, and Cignifi, a leading US fintech company, announced today a partnership that has the potential to significantly improve access to financial services for millions of underserved consumers across Brazil.

The partners will collaborate to launch the country’s first online platform that will provide credit, marketing, fraud and other insights on underserved consumers and SMEs using alternative telecom data combined with a proprietary artificial intelligence and machine learning platform.

Quod and Cignifi are in advanced discussions with mobile operators and retailers to bring this data platform to market, and by combining alternative data with Quod’s positive approach to credit scoring, the platform will enable consumers and micro-entrepreneurs to gain access to a broad range of credit products and services, while opening an untapped new customer base to lenders.

“Quod’s mission is to connect consumers and businesses in a brand-new way. Approximately 30% of Brazilian consumers are unbanked, so we need an innovative, secure and tested approach to bring these consumers to the credit market while minimizing uncertainty for lenders” said Rodrigo Abreu, Quod’s CEO.

“We are very excited to help introduce a positive credit approach to Brazil,” said Jonathan Hakim, Cignifi’s CEO. “The main goal of this partnership is to connect people, companies and financial institutions in a transparent and efficient way and allow all parties to make better, more informed credit and marketing decisions.”

The Quod-Cignifi Platform will provide substantial coverage on millions of new-to-credit customers in Brazil. The emergence of a Positive Credit Bureau is significant because it rewards consumers for their positive, responsible use of credit, rather than simply exclude them based on any potential negative credit events in their record. Customer privacy and compliance are also major priorities of the Quod/Cignifi Partnership and will be rigorously protected by use of anonymized data and customer opt-ins.

From the business perspective, the initial roll-out of this partnership will address three of the most immediate challenges faced by telco operators:

• High initial customer default risk and fraud exposure

• The challenge of contacting customers who have defaulted and have no valid contact information

• The difficulties of effectively processing and utilizing the vast amount of data Telcos generate

Mobile operators will also benefit from advanced customer lifecycle tools to help minimize churn and increase lifetime customer value, and they will also gain access to highly granular market share insights of their customer base. The partnership’s product offerings will include credit insights to complement Quod’s positive scores, fraud scores to screen credit applications and on-line transactions, and propensity indicators to enable digital marketing initiatives.

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