Research, Finance

Seeing trust where credit scores don’t

Why reliable people stay invisible to credit bureaus, and what a fairer score would need.

By the OrzyneX team, October 2026

Many workers in the UAE pay rent on time, top up their phones every month and send money home without fail. Yet when they ask for a loan, a bank may see almost nothing. Without a credit history there is no score, and without a score, credit is hard to get or expensive.

This is the question behind our founder’s book, Beyond the Score, and his published research.

Reliability that bureaus never see

Traditional credit scores are built from loans and credit cards. People who have never had them are “credit invisible”, even when their everyday payments show they are reliable. Rent, utility bills, mobile top-ups and remittances all tell a story about how someone manages money.

What the research tested

In a study published in the National High School Journal of Science, Hrithik Manikandan compared four data-science models on 10,000 simulated worker profiles built from this kind of everyday data. The profiles were simulated, not real people, so the results show what is possible, not what a lender should do tomorrow.

Accuracy is not enough

One lesson stood out: the most accurate model is not automatically the best one to use. A fair score must also treat different groups, such as workers of different nationalities, consistently. It must also be explainable, so that people can understand why they were scored the way they were.

What comes next for Finangl

Finangl today helps people learn about money and compare remittance rates. Behaviour-based alternative credit scoring is the next step we are working towards, built on these principles of fairness and explainability.

Read the research paper, or find Beyond the Score on Amazon.