Making access to credit more
democratic: tools and practices between
social innovation and old inequalities*
Valentina Moiso
National Research
Council of Italy
Institute for
Economic Research on Firm and Growth CNR-CERIS Collegio
Carlo Alberto - via Real Collegio, n. 30
10024 Moncalieri (Torino) – ITALY
Tel.: +39 011 68 24 948;
fax : +39 011 68 24 966;
email:
Indirizzo e-mail protetto dal bots spam , deve abilitare Javascript per vederlo
Abstract: The economic crisis highlights the problem of access
to credit also from the point of view of families. The Italian banking industry
has launched projects aimed at offering financial support to disadvantaged
people, implementing new products for certain categories of customers normally
excluded from credit due to the high risks involved. The information collected
about each customer is an input in the decision-making process. Hence, it is
crucial to investigate how it is selected, how it is (re)assembled, and how it
is evaluated. Understanding how information about a customer is selected and
processed helps us to identify what resources owned by households are
translated into a positive score to access credit and into opportunities to
enjoy additional goods and services, thus reconfiguring the trends of inclusion
and exclusion within the financial system.
Keywords: access to credit,
risk evaluation, peer to peer lending, financial and social innovation.
* The
paper was accepted at SASE 2014 Conference, Chicago, 10-12 July 2014,
Mini-conference Domesticizing Financial Economies: Knitting Fibers of
Transaction, Algorithm and Exchange.