Deserve

At Deserve, we are committed to providing deserving but underserved people access to fair credit.

When it comes to credit, most young people are caught in a catch-22: they don’t qualify for credit because they lack credit history, and to build a credit history they first need to get credit.

Deserve is different. Where traditional lenders see risk, Deserve sees potential. Instead of just looking at credit history, we measure each applicant’s credit potential by looking at factors such as education, current financial health, and future employability and earnings potential.

Deserve is developing a strong market niche around providing access to financial products (credit cards, student loans, etc) to deserving but underserved populations: current students, international students studying in the U.S. and recent alumni. The current credit policies from traditional firms handicap them, leaving them unable to get a credit card, student loan or car lease without paying exorbitant costs/fees. Given their lack of credit history or credit score, (“thin file, no file”) we evaluate these students using alternate data science and machine learning methods to measure creditworthiness using our proprietary data science framework/algorithms. We determine students’ ability to repay using such predictive attributes as education/major, cost of education, source of initial funding, future employability and objective measures (e.g. places, times, graphs) using our framework. Our compliance framework takes into consideration various federal regulatory constraints concerning KYC/CIP, Fair Lending, CDR, ECOA and FCRA.

Ultimately, we believe credit and lending should be a win-win-win. Helping our customers be successful with credit and become financially independent is good for them, it’s good for our business, and it’s good for society, overall.