SUNRISE BANKS

inclusion for the bank ' s customers and drive down the cost of referencing . “ With credit checks , there ' s going to be a document ; there ' s going to be some compliance risk there ; there ' s going to be a need for us to capture consumer information for us to run them through and provide them disclosures ,” Seydel explains . “ If you can take that component and design a product without doing a credit check , and remove all that complexity , then you ' ll reduce the cost . That ' s what we did .”

So doesn ' t the removal of credit checks add extra risk ? In short , yes . Seydel acknowledges that there is inherently more risk , but the bank takes measures to ensure a customer ' s ability to repay and guard against lending to customers who can ' t afford it . Credit files don ' t contain information about earnings anyway , so Sunrise Banks is focusing on a metric that it believes is more central to a customer ' s ability to repay .

“ What you ' re doing is knowingly accepting a marginal amount more risk ,” he continues . “ It ’ s all about driving down the credit product cost , it ' s about inclusivity , and it ' s about creating an environment that allows people to participate .”

Doubling down on financial inclusion One of the ways Sunrise may improve its credit decisioning in future is by utilising open banking , which will connect directly to a customer ' s bank account and provide a clearer picture of their incomings , outgoings , and transactional history . But that still stops short of a full credit check . It stresses that this would be to aid the impact of what it already does ; and , as a social enterprise , it has no plan to compromise on its mission in pursuit of greater profit margins .

Seydel says : “ When we start to talk about open banking , gaining access to that data will

TYLER SEYDEL CHIEF FINTECH OFFICER , SUNRISE BANKS

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