Psychometric Credit Scoring in Latin America: Replicated Samples Across Five Countries

Psychometric credit scoring models tap relevant behavioral data associated with borrowers’ personal character traits. Despite the increased application of psychometric models in recent years, this topic remains largely understudied. In addition, given their behavioral nature, the efficacy of psychometric models may differ across culturally diverse geographic regions, making it difficult to generalize findings from individual local studies alone. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to provide empirical evidence for psychometric scoring in Latin America, based on a total of 26, 638 borrowers from five different countries. The results found the psychometric model to be consistently and similarly correlated with loan defaults across all samples. AUCs ranged from 0.629 to 0.767, KSs from 0.201 to 0.416, and default rates decreased monotonically along the score bands. Overall, the results support the usage of psychometric credit solutions in Latin America, particularly with respect to improving financial inclusion among underbanked consumers.