What is Shared consumer?
Risk
A shared consumer is a customer who holds active credit with more than one type of institution at the same time (for example, a fintech and a traditional bank). Their true indebtedness is only visible by looking at the whole financial system, not a single institution in isolation.
Why it matters
If each institution looks only at its own relationship with the customer, it underestimates the risk. In Colombia, nearly 60% of fintech users also hold debt with traditional banks (source: TransUnion, 2024): without a consolidated view, that burden stays invisible until delinquency appears.
- True indebtedness belongs to the system, not one lender.
- Key to detecting over-indebtedness in time.
- Requires consolidating bureau and sources at the decision point.
Common questions
How is a shared consumer identified?+
By consolidating, at decision time, the queries to the bureau and other sources that reveal the applicant's obligations across the whole system. A decision engine centralizes those queries and applies the indebtedness criteria in a single policy.
Related terms
Alternative data
Alternative data are non-traditional information sources —transactional behavior, open banking, device data, telco or utilities— that complement the credit bureau to assess applicants with little or no history. They make it possible to lend to populations traditional scoring can't reach.
Champion/Challenger testing
Champion/Challenger is a technique for improving credit policies by routing a share of traffic to an alternative policy (the challenger) and comparing its performance against the one in production (the champion). It lets teams validate changes on real data at controlled risk before adopting them.
Credit scoring
Credit scoring is the technique of assigning an applicant a score that estimates their likelihood of repayment, combining internal data with external sources such as credit bureaus, behavioural data and alternative data. That score feeds the lending decision alongside policy rules.
Back to the full glossary.
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