Julie Sutton
25-06-26
A doctor who spent years building a clear credit record in Nigeria arrives in London. An engineer with a history of consistent mortgage payments in Brazil moves to Canada for a new role. In their home countries, both were considered creditworthy. In their new ones, they are invisible to the financial system.
These are not edge cases. This issue affects millions of migrants each year, and the consequences are considerable. According to analysis from Mastercard and TomoCredit, 76% of recently arrived immigrants in the United States had no previously established US credit history. The problem is that credit bureaus in one country do not share data with those in another. Foreign bank accounts, overseas mortgages and years of consistent payments contribute nothing to a credit profile once you cross a border.
The result is what researchers describe as a ‘thin file’ – a credit profile with too little data to generate a reliable score. For a newly arrived immigrant, thin file status often means rejection for a credit card, denial on a rental application or no access to the short-term credit that helps manage the costs of relocating. Research published in the Review of Economic Studies (Dobbie et al., 2021) found that one UK lender's decisions were systematically biased against immigrants because assessors focused on short-term outcomes rather than long-term repayment performance.
Someone who owned a car in Lagos may find themselves unable to finance one in London. Someone who maintained a mortgage in São Paulo may be asked to pay several months' rent upfront in Toronto because their credit profile shows nothing. Building a credit history from scratch in a new country, while managing relocation costs and a lower-than-usual starting income, is a slow and expensive process.
For financial institutions, it represents a missed opportunity. These are consumers with employment income, stable addresses, often higher-than-average education levels and demonstrated financial discipline in their home countries. They are exactly the customers banks should want to serve. The barrier is not risk – it is the absence of local data.
A growing number of fintechs are designing specifically for diaspora communities. The model typically combines transaction account access with a card product linked to real spending behaviour, which begins to build a credit footprint from the first day of use. Some platforms incorporate open banking to include income data and payment history in lending decisions. Others start with a prepaid or secured card and move customers into credit products as their payment record develops.
One fintech currently building in this space, serving immigrant communities arriving in the UK, is taking exactly this approach. With no minimum credit score requirement at onboarding, they assess customers based on current financial behaviour rather than the absence of a local history. Their card programme gives members immediate spending capability and generates the transactional data that informs future credit decisions. The product grows with the customer, rather than waiting for a bureau score that may take years to develop.
This approach is only possible when the underlying issuing infrastructure supports non-standard onboarding criteria and graduated product access. Paymentology, the platform built for growth, enables fintechs to build exactly these kinds of programmes.
Through BIN sponsoring and prepaid card issuing, institutions can onboard customers quickly, including those who fall outside conventional eligibility criteria. Data Intelligence tools give issuers visibility into spending patterns, supporting continuous credit assessment that replaces the snapshot approach of a traditional bureau check. As a customer's history develops on the platform, the same infrastructure can support a transition to credit card products without migrating to a different processor.
Global remittances reached approximately $905 billion in 2024, according to World Bank estimates, with the majority flowing from economically active migrants in developed markets back to families in lower-income ones. These are earners, contributors and savers who happen to have arrived in a country where the credit infrastructure does not yet know them.
Fintechs and neobanks that build for diaspora communities are addressing a genuine gap in financial access, and they are doing so with a customer base that is loyal, engaged and consistently overlooked by incumbents. The institutions that build the right products for this segment will find long-term relationships rather than transactional ones and a route to financial inclusion that creates real, sustained progress for the people it serves.
