FICO Launches Innovative Score to Help Ukrainians Get Credit

Today is a milestone for financial inclusion, as we launch a new score aimed at helping  Ukrainian refugees get credit. This initiative, undertaken with Poland’s Biuro Informacji Kredytowej (BIK) and the Ukrainian Bureau of Credit Histories (UBCH), is part of FICO’s long-standing commitment to creating an inclusive lending ecosystem. We do our part by developing innovative solutions that enable lenders to do more responsible lending to more consumers, and help a wider variety of consumers looking for financing options to achieve their goals.

Here’s the challenge: When people move from one country to another, their credit history doesn’t move with them. It’s stuck at the credit reporting agency in the country they’re leaving. So for the estimated 6 million Ukrainian refugees who fled as a result of the war, getting credit in a new country could be challenging, as lenders do their risk assessment using credit histories and the credit scores based on those histories.

To solve this problem, three entities — the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group; BIK, the only credit bureau in Poland; and UBCH, Ukraine’s largest credit reporting agency — established a secure cross-border data corridor to carry credit data between Ukraine and Poland. FICO was brought into this project as the global leader in credit risk assessment. We built a FICO^® Score based on UBCH data that lenders can use when offering credit to displaced Ukrainians. This score will first be available in Poland, where some 2 million Ukrainian nationals have settled.

We undertook this humanitarian effort with BIK and UBCH to help ease the burden on Ukrainians by giving them a path toward accessing the credit and financing they need. Access to credit provides an opportunity to give financial independence to refugees so they can get loans, apply for credit cards, buy a car or home, or finance businesses.

“Providing access to credit for Ukrainian refugees displaced through the conflict in Ukraine is a fundamental obligation for us,“ said Mariusz Cholewa, CEO of BIK, and president of the European credit bureau association, ACCIS. “Supporting citizens as they settle improves their quality of life at a time when they have already been subject to upheaval and trauma. For us, this is not a commercial operation but a humanitarian effort to ease the burden.”

“We hope to boost credit access and economic resilience for displaced Ukrainians during the ongoing war with the deployment of the FICO Score,” said Bohdan Pshenychnyi, director, UBCH. “Providing credit histories to lenders in other countries is the right thing to do so that Ukrainians can benefit from their positive credit history earned at home and can qualify for loans. As the leader in credit scoring, FICO is the only partner who can provide the trusted solution we need.”

The Financial Inclusion Imperative

This project is just one way that FICO works to increase credit access globally. For example, as part of our Financial Inclusion Initiative, FICO offers the FICO^® Score for International Markets. FICO Scores have been made available in more than 40 countries across five continents. In the US, FICO has made the investment in multiple programs that not only promote financial inclusion but also empower consumers to better understand how to manage their credit and gain financial independence.

As a relative newcomer to FICO’s Scores business, projects like these excite me. By using our leadership in predictive analytics to provide robust risk tools, we help lenders serve more people while giving consumers more options to access credit to improve their financial health. It’s a win for the lenders, a win for regional economies, and most of all a win for the people themselves.

Learn More About How FICO Powers Financial Inclusion

• Discover our Financial Inclusion Initiative
• Explore our milestones in financial inclusion innovation