Banks Are Looking At Unorthodox Ways to Approve Or Disapprove Your Loan

What is this world coming to?  I just heard that sometime in the very near future, banks could be reviewing your Facebook profile to determine if you should be approved for a loan…or not.  What?  Crazy, right? 

Well, employers are looking at Facebook to determine if someone should be hired, so why shouldn’t banks do the same?  Oh, wait a minute, they’re not looking at your profile, they’re scanning your friends list.  Oh yeah, you read that correctly.

Apparently there is a new technology, patented no less, that banks can use to review the credit history of your friends.  Whooo, a little too big brother to me, what do you think?

So here’s a little bit about how it works…Facebook looks at the credit history of your friends, then what they do is average out the numbers as part of the approval process.  In other words, if you have friends that have poor credit, it could impact whether or not you will get the loan.

Seems really crazy, especially if you have nothing but deadbeat friends, huh?  Well, I guess it’s time to tweak the old security settings once again. Below is an actual excerpt from the patent itself.

When an individual applies for a loan, the lender examines the credit ratings of members of the individual's social network who are connected to the individual through authorized nodes. If the average credit rating of these members is at least a minimum credit score, the lender continues to process the loan application. Otherwise, the loan application is rejected.