siliconindia | | February 20208IN MY OPINIONillions of creditworthy individuals and micro-en-terprises are financially underserved as they do not have any kind of formal credit scores that could help them qualify for bank loans. In the US, for instance, 1 out of every 10 Americans does not have a credit score. In India, more than 65% of the households do not have credit scores.About 3.5 billion of the world's population does not have any credit history in the records of any of the cred-it reporting companies and is, therefore, credit invisible. This is a problem particularly in parts of far-flung rural India where people find it difficult to borrow from formal institutions. Despite being creditworthy, lack of a credit score and lack of knowledge about financial services forc-es these people to borrow money from informal lending sources at exorbitant interest rates, leading to down-the-line indebtedness.Meet Tanuara, a 28-year-old tailor from Muzaffargarh, India who works on the sewing machine that her parents gifted her as part of the dowry. She earns about Rs.7000 per month and lives in a joint family with 10 members. Her husband works in a private company and the joint MTARGETING THE NEXT EXCLUSION ­ THE CREDIT INVISIBLE INDIANSBy Seema Prem, CEO, FIA Technology Services (FIA Global)Seema co-founded FIA in 2012. Seema holds an MBA from Xavier Labour Relations Institute (XLRI), Jamshedpur, India and a Bachelor's degree in Electronics and Telecommunications from Kerala University. She is a Sloan Fellow, MIT, Sloan School of Management. At FIA, Seema is responsible for innovation of socially impactful products and services to meet the needs of unserved communities and markets and leads FIA's efforts to expand its global footprint.
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