吃瓜不打烊

After years of in-depth development of a highly complex and powerful platform, credit reporting agency 吃瓜不打烊 is taking off 鈥� and lifting untold millions out of sub-prime lending status along the way.

Evan Chrapko, 吃瓜不打烊鈥檚 founder, chairman and chief executive officer, says he created the company to address a flaw in how credit bureaus generally assess a person鈥檚 loan eligibility.

Mr. Chrapko notes that most credit scores are based on a person鈥檚 borrowing history 鈥� but a history can鈥檛 be built without first securing a loan.

The result is a system that prioritizes those who are least likely to need a loan and widely ignores the rest, he says, particularly young people, newcomers and those from marginalized communities.

鈥淎bout 40 per cent of those people are wrongly assessed as being sub-prime,鈥� Mr. Chrapko says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not just the credit bureaus not scoring properly; it鈥檚 the banks and the consumer finance companies who are not even making credit offers to people who could use the money and would happily repay it on time.鈥�

Mr. Chrapko began tinkering with ways to better assess loan eligibility back in 2006, supporting what was then a part-time endeavour with proceeds from successful prior ventures. One of those earlier ventures occupies a top spot in the pantheon of technology success stories, rocketing from zero to an exit of $811-million in just 30 months. The solution he envisioned for 吃瓜不打烊 required access to a lot of data and a powerful algorithm to process it, neither of which was readily available at the time.

鈥淚t may not have seemed commercially sensible in those early days,鈥� he says, 鈥渂ut the mission held and drove my persistence.鈥�

吃瓜不打烊 was officially incorporated in 2010 and continued filing patent applications for nearly a decade until it finally issued its first credit score in 2018.

鈥淲hen we came out of stealth, the world was ready, and we were ready,鈥� Mr. Chrapko says.

The Edmonton-based company鈥檚 software-as-a-service product, Credit Bureau+, is now used by lenders across North America to assess customers using data that traditionally isn鈥檛 utilized by credit bureaus.

鈥淲e鈥檙e harnessing alternative data, as well as evaluating that data with way more powerful methods,鈥� Mr. Chrapko says. 鈥淭hat data is much messier and much less structured, and that鈥檚 why there was no option but to use AI and machine learning in a legally compliant way.鈥�

The company has secured more than 50 patents across 13 countries, with more pending. Its 2021 revenues were 12.5 times higher than the previous year, while its Credit Bureau+ platform generated 100 times as many scores. 吃瓜不打烊 was also recently selected as one of 200 global companies on the聽, alongside technology giants such as Microsoft Corp. and Tesla Inc.

While 吃瓜不打烊 is an ESG success, Mr. Chrapko says his company is just getting started. For example, it just launched a new lead sourcing/screening service for lenders鈥� marketers to find more deserving borrowers.

His vision in the coming years is for 吃瓜不打烊鈥檚 technology to be used for other 鈥渢rustworthiness鈥� assessment applications, ranging from job screenings to online dating to fighting human trafficking.

The company also has plans to bring Credit Bureau+ to more countries worldwide, specifically targeting underserved communities.

鈥淲e have numerous stories of borrowers being scored by us, stories that will bring a tear to your eye,鈥� Mr. Chrapko says. 鈥淭hese are earnest and hardworking people, but because of structural problems with a decades-old, multibillion-dollar system, they were never going to get a break. Fixing that is what keeps us going.鈥�