A Novel Modified Binning and Logistics Regression to Handle Shifting in Credit Scoring

The development of financial technology (Fintech) in emerging economies such as Indonesia has been rapid in the last few years, opening a great potential for loan businesses, from venture capital to micro and personal loans. To survive in such competitive markets, new companies need a robust credit-scoring model. However, building a reliable model requires large stable data. The challenge is that datasets are often small, covering only a few months (short-period datasets). Therefore, this study proposes a modified binning method, namely changing a variable’s values into two groups with the smallest distribution differences possible. Modified binning can maintain data trends to avoid future shifting. The simulation was conducted using a real dataset from Indonesian Fintech, comprising 44,917 borrower-level observations with 396 variables. To match the actual conditions, the first three months of data were allocated for modeling and the remaining for testing. Implementing modified binning and logistics regression to testing data results in a more stable score band than standard binning. Compared with other classifier methods, the proposed method obtained the best AUC results on the testing data (0.73). In addition, the proposed method is highly applicable as it can provide a straightforward explanation to upper management or regulators. It is practical to use in real-case financial technology with short-period problems.