Going forward, when banks review loans for small business owners, they will apply a "growth grade" that measures growth potential. In measuring the growth grade, they will use information on small business owners from major platforms such as NAVER in addition to existing data from credit bureaus (CBs).
According to the financial sector on the 22nd, the financial authorities decided to introduce a growth grade system as they build a small business owner–focused credit scoring framework (SCB). The idea is to measure growth potential alongside existing credit grades to lower the barrier to loans for small business owners.
With the introduction of the growth grade, even early-stage small business owners without collateral capacity will be able to get loans if their sales are increasing or if the repurchase rate at a portal site's Smart Store is high. The financial authorities are supplementing nonfinancial data for building an SCB that applies the growth grade by using information held by NAVER and KBIZ.
The Korea Credit Information Services will lead the measurement of the growth grade. Typically, when a small business owner applies for a bank loan, the bank evaluates a credit grade through a CB company or its own model and decides whether to lend. In this process, the credit information service receives data held by NICE, Korea Credit Bureau (KCB), NAVER, KBIZ, and others to measure the small business owner's growth grade.
CB companies receive the growth grade from the credit information service, combine it with the credit grade, and deliver it to banks. Banks execute loans based on this. They plan to use NAVER Smart Place data and KBIZ mutual aid data, among others, in assessing the growth grade.
The financial authorities plan to first apply the SCB with the growth grade to policy loans handled by banks and then expand it to the private sector. To boost financial institutions' use of the SCB, they are also said to be creating a small business finance dashboard. They plan to check banks' use of the SCB in real time and encourage performance competition.