Wow, there is so much going on these days!  Exciting times.  My colleagues at CFSI and I have long been interested in what we call “alternative credit.”  Basically, it’s the use of new types of data to help lenders figure out good risk from bad for the 50 million Americans who are not well represented in the credit bureaus (Experian, Equifax and TransUnion).  We have intuited that the relevance of these alternative data – things like rent payments, public record data, telecom payments, etc – has increased dramatically in the past 2 years.  Exquifax recently provided some data to make the point, “88 million fewer general purpose and private label bank card accounts on file at the end of September versus one year before. Credit lines were reduced by $751 billion,” as reported by Nilson Report.  Alternative data and analytics are becoming important for a much greater swath of civilization, but of course disproportionately so for the underbanked and underserved.   This is good news for our portfolio companies Microbilt, L2C and RentBureau.  Whoever you are, pay yer bills!