Abstract

This paper investigates how to improve statistical-based credit scoring of SMEs involved in P2P lending. The methodology discussed in the paper is a factor network-based segmentation for credit score modeling. The approach first constructs a network of SMEs where links emerge from comovement of latent factors, which allows us to segment the heterogeneous population into clusters. We then build a credit score model for each cluster via lasso-type regularization logistic regression. We compare our approach with the conventional logistic model by analyzing the credit score of over 15000 SMEs engaged in P2P lending services across Europe. The result reveals that credit risk modeling using our network-based segmentation achieves higher predictive performance than the conventional model.

Highlights

  • Issuance of loans by traditional financial institutions, such as banks, to other firms and individuals, is often associated with major risks

  • This paper investigates how factor-network-based segmentation can be employed to improve the statistical-based credit score for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) involved in P2P lending

  • We show via our empirical results that our network-based segmentation presents a more efficient scheme that achieves higher performance than the conventional approach

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Summary

Introduction

Issuance of loans by traditional financial institutions, such as banks, to other firms and individuals, is often associated with major risks. It is well known that some percentage of these non-performing loans are eventually imputed to economic losses. To minimize such risk exposures, various methods have been extensively discussed in the credit risk literature to enable credit-issuing institutions to undertake a thorough assessment to classify loan applicants into risky and non-risky customers. Some of these methods range from logistic and linear probability models to decision trees, neural networks and support vector machines. For a comprehensive review on credit scoring models, see Alam et al (2010)

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