Personal values and credit scoring: new insights in the financial prediction

The objective of quantitative credit scoring is to develop accurate models of classification. Most attention has been devoted to deliver new classifiers based on variables commonly used in the economic literature. Several interdisciplinary studies have found that personality traits are related to financial behaviour; therefore, psychological traits could be used to lower credit risk in scoring models. In our paper, we considered financial histories and psychological traits of customers of an Italian bank. We compared the performance of kernel-based classifiers with those of standard ones. We found very promising results in terms of misclassification error reduction when personality attitudes are included in models, with both linear and non-linear discriminants. We also measured the contribution of each variable to risk prediction in order to assess importance of each predictor.