TANZANIA’S FIRST REAL CREDIT SCORES LAUNCHED IN DAR

Chief Executive Officer of Dun & Bradstreet Credit Bureau, Miguel Llenas explains the benefits of credit reports during the launch of credit scores in Tanzania.

General Manager of Dun & Bradstreet Credit Bureau, Adebowale Atobatele gives a vote of thanks to Bank of Tanzania and the company’s subscribers for their continued support to the growth of Tanzania’s financial sector.

Bank of Tanzania's Director of the Financial Sector Supervision, Jerry Sabi addresses the participants during the launch of credit scores by Dun & Bradstreet Credit Bureau in Tanzania.

Tanzania’s leading Credit Reference Bureau, Dun & Bradstreet Credit Bureau Tanzania Limited has launched Tanzania’s first real predictive credit score in Tanzania.

The Score is a proprietary risk management solution that is bespoke to Tanzania's consumer credit market.

According to the Chief Executive Officer of D&B Credit Bureau, Mr. Miguel Llenas said the score is launched to help address the challenges faced by all stakeholders in Tanzania’s credit market.

He said it will aid responsible lending and borrowing, help lenders and creditors manage their loan books, ensure that interest rates match the credit profile of borrowers and promote the proliferation of credit or loan products in the market.

Speaking further, the company’s pioneer General Manager, Mr. Adebowale Atobatele said their aim has always been to provide sound risk management solution to creditors of all categories and across various sectors with particular focus on providing our partners with sufficient information required to make sound credit decisions.

“But also accelerate their speed of decision making; provide easy & quick access to credit products to eligible companies and individuals thereby augmenting growth opportunities for the entire economy. We will continue to work closely with all stakeholders and relevant parties in Tanzania to help to build a robust credit information infrastructure for Tanzania,” he said.

He said a credit score is a numeric valuation that lenders use, along with the credit report, to evaluate the risk of offering a loan or providing credit.

“Credit scores are important metrics of creditworthiness that can determine whether you get a loan, what interest rates you pay on debts, and more. Lenders use credit scoring, among other data points, to decide on whether to extend or deny credit. A person's credit score is generally a three-digit number within a specific range. The higher the score, the lower is the probability for a person to default on one the loan obligations in the coming 12 months,” he said.

The company’s Chief Technical Officer, Kelyn Pena said D&B’s consumer credit score is unique in Tanzania because of its purely statistical background.

“Our unblemished model definition and best practice allows for our Credit Score to be unique, customizable and predictive. This credit score is intuitive, simple and ready to use by financial institutions and consumers at large. In addition, it is stable in timeline and variation of consumer credit history nature.” said.

He said a Credit Score provides variety of benefits to different sets of users such as borrower by establishes the ability to borrow or not to borrow, reduces the time taken to get a loan, acts as a numerical reputational collateral thus removing ambiguity and subjectivity and enables to get better deals and interest rate and easy to keep tracking.

“It gives lender a credit issuance process gets simplified and automated; manual subjectivity in assessments/underwriting is reduced, faster rate of approval/rejections and easy to manage the clients post approval

“Also Service Provider can faster rate of customer acquisition, easier to assign, automate and manage credit limits and improved cross and up selling.