zipMoney shows how far fintech could come with open data | finder.com.au

"'If you got to America and you sign up for PayPal credit, the data availability from credit files in America is very rich, whereas in Australia we still run a negative credit reporting environment,' Larry Diamond, CEO and co-founder of zipMoney said.

'We were trying to work out how we can do this (zipMoney) with this seamless user experience where we can satisfy responsible lending in terms of asking certain questions, but then also mitigating the risk. And that's where we've been working on this engine that uses conventional credit data, but also non-conventional credit data, to make decisions.'

This 'non-conventional' credit data includes everything from device fingerprinting and social data to banking transactional data. The payments provider's recent partnership with Pocketbook also demonstrates its commitment to relying on rich data.

'They (Pocketbook) have been pulling bank data for about six years and they pull over 200,000 bank accounts. So they've got some of the best categorisation of banking data in Australia and I think the biggest non-financial bank data in Australia from its user base. So we work very closely with them on our data science to continuously work on the engine,' Diamond said."