Ever since the global financial crisis, retail banks have shied from providing loans to small business. This has provided an opportunity for new startups to service this demand.
Access to recent, accurate and comparable data is key to making profitable credit decisions.
There are several data sources which are commonly used by vendors to base their credit decisions:
- Merchant transaction data (credit card sales etc.);
- Accounting data (Xero, Quickbooks etc); and
- Open banking data (watch this space - particularly in Europe);
Vendors build ‘black box’ algorithms and scoring system to interpret these data sets. These algorithms replace manual...
I’ve been meaning to go to CES for a long time but never quite made the pilgrimage until 2018. CES is an amazing resource and I would highly recommend a trip for anyone working in the Technology field with an amazing array of vendors. Below are a few tips and tricks from my first visit to CES.
Credentials
CES is an industry only event, meaning that you need an affiliation with the Consumer Electronics industry in order to attend. The scope of the affiliation is quite broad and includes journalists, financiers, buyers, distributors and founders.
Plan
Given the...
New Zealand Companies Office data is complex and I have built several internal tools for my employer to present and explore complex datasets to satisfy risk management and support analysis.
A more recent project involved developing a self-service Ruby application to explore n-degrees of director relationships using the NZ Companies Office API (NZBN Ruby Wrapper).
While completing the project I ran into a number of interesting challenges:
- Query optimisation. The first query builds an array of primary directors then new queries are run for each of these primary directors, determining the secondary directors until all layers of...
I’ve converted the previous site from Anchor CMS to Jekyll to allow more flexibility (and hopefully in turn will mean more content).
Theme is based on Xian with a few tweaks and customisations. If anyone wants a copy, please let me know and I will release to Github.
A few years ago I published the nzcoapi gem which was primarily a wrapper for ‘difficult to navigate’ SOAP API provided by the New Zealand Companies Office.
The API has been grandfathered and a flash new NZBN API is available which is a lot cleaner and easy to use. I had to update a number of applications and have now released an updated Ruby Gem which makes interacting with the new NZBN API a breeze.
Simple and fast authenticating API wrapper for the New Zealand Companies Office. Full...