数字向钱冲.docVIP

Go figure ASKING a friend for a loan is a quick way to tide you over till the end of the month. But Wonga, a British internet firm, is almost as fast. Those in need of cash give the service some basic information about themselves. If Wonga considers them trustworthy, the money—as much as ￡400 ($641) for up to 30 days for first-time users—arrives in their accounts within 15 minutes.Consumer advocates are highly critical of the service: its annual interest rate currently exceeds 4,000%. But Wonga, which uses funding from its venture-capital backers to make loans, is attracting attention for other reasons. The firm is one of a growing number of internet start-ups that mine unconventional forms of data to offer financial services.Klarna, a Swedish company that counts Sequoia Capital, a noted venture-capital firm, among its financial backers, allows consumers to shop online by simply typing in their date of birth, name and address. Klarna fronts up the payments and charges retailers a fee for making online purchases easier. Shoppers pay only once they have received the goods. ReadyForZero, a start-up in Silicon Valley, lets people see all their credit-card debts in one place and puts together a plan to pay them off.Of course, conventional lenders sift（筛选） through information about borrowers to decide whether someone is a good risk. But the start-ups are different. First, they combine data from many sources. Klarna started by looking at conventional credit scores, but it says that the actual behaviour of shoppers has much more “predictive power”, in the words of Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Klarna’s chief executive. The company receives a lot of data from online stores, including things like the time of purchase and whether the consumer’s name and address were typed or copied in (the latter is more likely to signal fraud). Wonga draws on “all publicly available data”, in the words of Errol Damelin, Wonga’s boss, who does not want to be more specific for security reasons.