creditsense is a credit history and scoring application designed purely for fun and experimentation.
In its current state the installation guide is specific to Mac OSX:
git checkout https://github.com/mgldev/creditsense creditsense
Within the repository root:
npm install
bower install
In order to run the application you'll need grunt
and compass
available:
npm install -g grunt
sudo gem install compass
To run the project:
grunt serve
The grunt task should automatically launch a browser and point it at the now running local webserver.
There are agencies known as CRAs - Credit Reference Agencies.
There are several CRAs in the UK, namely:
- Experian
- Equifax
- CallCredit
Each CRA holds a credit file for you, containing information such as:
- Accounts (Bank accounts, telephone contracts, credit cards and loans)
- Address history (and Electoral Roll data)
- CCJ and bankruptcy information
- History of searches against your credit file
In addition to your credit file / history, CRAs often offer a "Credit Score:
- Assesses your credit file for positive and negative events / data
- Provides a numeric 'score' value to provide an indication as to how 'credit worthy' you may be to potential lenders
creditsense allows a user to define their own credit history and credit scoring engine:
- Users can populate their own 'credit history' - Accounts, addresses, CCJs, searches
- Users can define their own Credit Scoring rules
Using these features it is possible to play around with various different scenarios and see how certain changes and events can affect your credit score. Each CRA or credit score provider will have their own distinct set of rules as to what they regard as positive or negative events against a credit file - this application puts the assessment engine for analysing a credit file in the users hands.
I decided to develop creditsense for the following reasons:
- A project to play with and gain experience with AngularJS
- To demonstrate the underlying principles of how credit scoring engines work
This project is not intended to be a tool which people can rely on for an assessment of their credit. It exists only to provide an understanding of how a rules based engine can be executed against an underlying credit file in order to generate an assessment.