How your smartphone use could affect your credit

For prospective borrowers who have no credit history, a common problem for immigrants whose credit starts anew when they move to the U.S., economists and startups are using metadata from smartphones to see how reliable a borrower is in other areas of their lives to help determine their likelihood of paying back a loan.

A recent article in the New Scientist cites research conducted by Brown University economist Daniel Björkegren and the Entrepreneurial Finance Lab which involved combing through cellphone data of 3,000 borrowers from a Haitian bank to identify such trends as how often they pay their cellphone bills, how quickly they return important phone calls, and travel behavior based on location data.

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