Questão de Língua Inglesa · CESGRANRIO CAIXA-01/2025 (nº 14)

How grocery shopping data is unlocking financial inclusion

Access to affordable credit is fundamental to personal resilience and economic advancement. It helps fund housing, education, small businesses, and insurance to protect against financial shocks. Globally, 1.4 billion adults have no access to formal financial services because they lack a credit history, which is only acquired once someone has been granted credit. This paradox means millions of people are financially excluded.

This is not only a problem in emerging and developing markets, but also in developed markets like the US and the UK where millions remain underserved: approximately 45 million Americans are either credit invisible or have unscorable credit files, and around 5 million UK residents lack a mainstream credit history. For financial institutions, this represents not just a moral imperative, but also a major opportunity to unlock a new and largely untapped market through innovative and ethical data use.

Grocery shopping data is emerging as one of the most powerful alternative data sources for understanding the financial behavior of "credit invisibles". These four key characteristics highlight why grocery data is so insightful for credit scoring people with no credit history: universality, recency, granularity and frequency. Everyone buys groceries. Grocery shopping is a universal necessity that cuts across socioeconomic, geographic, and demographic boundaries. This makes grocery data uniquely representative of the broader population, which is a rare attribute among alternative data sources. Unlike many traditional data sources, grocery data is continually refreshed. Most consumers shop for groceries weekly, if not more often. This regularity offers a real-time view into consumer behavior, enabling financial institutions to assess an individual's current financial situation with striking accuracy. Grocery shopping data captures detailed behavioral signals. For example, consistent purchasing of staple goods at the same time each month can indicate budgeting discipline. Price sensitivity and use of discounts may suggest cautious financial management. A high-percentage of healthy food items and lack of junk food can be an indicator of financial responsibility. The high frequency of grocery shopping offers a dense timeline of behavioral data, allowing models to detect consistent financial habits, patterns, and anomalies. Unlike once-off data points like loan applications, grocery data builds a behavioral track record over time.

Research by scholars at Rice University, the University of Notre Dame, and Northwestern University found that variables such as shopping frequency, consistency in spending, choice of products, and use of discount programs correlate strongly with credit risk profiles. Importantly, it demonstrated that these behavioral patterns could significantly improve the predictive power of credit models, particularly for consumers without formal credit histories.

Grocery shopping data is recent, frequent, universal, and rich in behavioral insights. Coupled with banking data within a privacy-preserving data collaboration environment, it's opening the path to financial inclusion and protection for millions. Financial inclusion has remained out of reach for far too many, for far too long. Grocery data, used responsibly and collaboratively, may be the innovation that changes that at scale.

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