Invisible Primes: Fintech Lending with Alternative Data

The authors thank the discussants Tobias Berg, Manju Puri, Bo Bian, Alyssa Brown, John Driscoll, Huan Tang, Nikhil Paradkar, Vesa Pursiainen, Sharada Sridhar, Emily Williams, Yao Zeng, and Vitaly Meursault; and seminar/conference participants at the University of Chicago Booth, the Yale School of Management, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan), the University of Southern California (Marshall), Colorado Leeds, the University of Houston, Florida University Business School, Baruch College, Louisiana State University, the University of California Los Angeles (Anderson), the Bank of England, the 11th Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Consumer Research Symposium, the 2022 Georgia State University (GSU)-Review of Financial Studies Fintech Conference, Financial Intermediation Research Society 2022, the National Bureau of Economic Research Summer Institute 2022, Northern Finance Association 2022, Managed Funds Association 2024, the GSU-Atlanta Fed Annual Financial Stability Conference, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency Emerging Risks in the Banking System Conference, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, the 6th CFPB Research Conference, the 5th Annual International Monetary Fund Macro-Financial Research Conference, the Eighth European Central Bank Annual Research Conference 2023, and the 4th Future of Financial Information Conference for helpful comments. The authors thank Upstart Network, Inc. for providing access to its data. Special thanks to Don Carmichael for his assistance in setting up access to the data infrastructure on the cloud and for his assistance in navigating the databases. The authors and Upstart structured the agreement in a way that maintains the authors’ independence. The results and views are those of the authors and do not reflect those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond or the Federal Reserve System.