A data-sharing agreement was recently signed by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) with TransUnion Philippines.
As reported, DTI will provide Publicly Available Data of business enterprises to the company, which is the country’s largest credit bureau, through the agreement.
About the Agreement
The data-sharing agreement will allow the company to develop a “firm bureau database” in order to expand distribution of its credit information not only to individuals but to firms as well.
This criterion is measured by the World Bank (WB) in their Doing Business (DB) Report under its “depth of credit information index.”
The signing of the data-sharing agreement is part of the Philippine government’s continuing effort to improve the country’s competitiveness ranking.
This partnership signals greater collaboration between the government and the private sector in using data analytics to help in policymaking and program development.
DTI Secretary Ramon Lopez explained that this initiative is hitting two birds with one stone.
Working closely with the company through information-sharing will secure additional points under the Getting Credit Indicator.
More importantly, the publicly available data will be processed together with the database so that they can be used to determine the borrowers’ creditworthiness.
In the end, this will contribute to increasing the bank’s efficiency in processing loan applications.
Background
Following the data protest filed by the Philippine government in 2018, the WB accepted the data correction request of the Philippine government when it confirmed that the company is the largest credit bureau in the country with 8.47 million adult population in its database.
This is 13.5% of the total adult population in the Philippines, which exceeded the WB threshold by 5%.
The data correction request resulted in a 35-point increase in the Philippines’ score for Getting Credit and a significant +52 notches increase in the indicator ranking.
The company uses the information to empower its lending partners in giving financial access to more consumers.
In order to do this, the company continually strives to bring in more extensive credit information from various sources into their database.
The more diverse and extensive the data, the more efficient it will be for the business partners to make decisions on extending credit to both consumers and businesses.
The DB Report is an annual survey report released by the World Bank.
In the DB 2020 report, the Philippines reached the Top 100 competitive countries when it recorded a +26-notch increase.
It remains to be the highest recorded annual improvement of the country since 2010. From 124th place, the Philippines rose to 95th.
With the enactment of RA 11032, or the “Ease of Doing Business and Efficient Government Service Delivery Act,” the DTI has turned over to the Anti Red Tape Authority (ARTA) the reform initiatives for the succeeding cycles.
Usefulness of Data
The significance of data use and data analytics is gaining traction across different countries. Initiatives about this have been reported by OpenGov Asia in the past.
For instance, India’s data and analytics platform will democratise publicly available government data. The platform will host the latest data sets from government websites, present them coherently, and provide analytic tools.
The National Data and Analytics Platform (NDAP) will follow a user-centric approach and will enable data access in a simple and intuitive portal tailored to the needs of a variety of stakeholders.
Meanwhile, the Hong Kong government announced that four city dashboards will help the public visualise real-time dynamic Hong Kong data.
The dashboards present data on environment and weather, transport and traffic, public facilities and services and a city overview on interactive charts and maps.
Researchers from CSIRO’s Data61, data and digital specialist data sciences arm of Australia’s national science agency, are working with researchers from the Macquarie University, in collaboration with the University of Sydney and Nokia Bell Labs for FinalBlacklist.
FinalBlacklist is the largest global cybersecurity threat dataset to predict future attacks.
The comprehensive data of the global cybersecurity threat landscape, which spanned from 2007-2017, was developed to enable cybersecurity specialists to derive new insights and predict future malicious online activity (mal-activity).
