Germany's largest credit score company, SCHUFA, has immense power over people's lives. A low SCHUFA score can leave you empty-handed - without an apartment, credit card, home loan and much more. But what if your SCHUFA score is low because there are mistakes in your credit history or your personal details are outdated? What if the score is calculated by a mathematical model that is biased?
The problem is, no one knows how accurate SCHUFA's data is and how the private company computes its credit ratings. OpenSCHUFA wants to change this. By analyzing thousands of donated credit scores, along with additional data provided by donors like you, we want to make the calculations of this private company more transparent.
To do this, we need to raise 50,000 € and collect as many SCHUFA records as possible. We're accepting donations of 5 € upwards. You can apply for a free copy of your SCHUFA record at selbstauskunft.net (in German). It would be great if you could donate your money AND your credit record, but if you just want to donate one or the other, that's fine, too.
The more records we receive, and the more details such as age, gender and residential area we collect, the more significant our findings will be. We need your help because no one else - neither politicians, nor regulatory authorities and certainly not SCHUFA - wants to shed light on how SCHUFA scores are worked out.
SCHUFA holds records on nearly 70 million people living in Germany. According to SCHUFA, nearly one in ten of these records has at least one negative entry.
SCHUFA gets its data from some 9,000 partners, such as banks and telecommunication companies. Incredibly, SCHUFA doesn't believe it has a responsibility to check the accuracy of the data it receives from its partners. In addition, the algorithm used by SCHUFA to calculate credit scores is protected as a trade secret so outside of the company, no one knows how the algorithm works or whether there are errors or injustices built into the model. This is why we started the OpenSCHUFA project.
You can follow OpenSCHUFA's progress on Facebook or Twitter. Our hashtag is #openschufa. You will also find regular updates in the project blog here on Startnext.