Borrowing by Phone: Why the Interface Is Now Part of Credit Risk

Two numbers changed the way I think about our business. The vast majority of loans at Dos-Credobank OJSC are now originated remotely. That's no longer an experiment; it's simply how we operate. What matters more is that a large share of our lending by volume now flows through the online channel. In other words, digital isn't where the small loans go. It's where the real money goes.

The implication is straightforward: most of our new loans now go to someone nobody sees at the moment they sign. They're reading the terms on a phone, maybe late at night, with no one around to answer a question.

Meanwhile, the industry conversation centers on two things: speed and fraud. That makes sense. Speed is easy to measure, and fraud shows up in the loss numbers. But speed has stopped being a differentiator. Everyone approves applications in minutes, from microlenders to point-of-sale financing at the checkout counter. There's not much left to compete on.

I'd argue the risk has moved somewhere the industry pays far less attention to.

A model makes the lending decision in minutes. Then comes the life of the loan, which can run for years. From that point on, outcomes depend not only on how good the model is, but on how well the borrower understands the product and manages what they owe. That's especially true for revolving credit cards. A standard installment loan comes with a schedule: you know the amounts and the due dates up front. A card with a grace period is more complicated, because the payment depends on how the customer uses it. Understanding how the card works becomes part of living up to the agreement.

The trouble with this kind of risk is that it never shows up as its own line item. A payment that's a few days late, a call to customer service, a card closed early, a customer who walks away. None of these is a big deal on its own. Added up, they carry a very real cost. And some of that cost comes not from the product being complicated, but from how it's explained to the customer when they actually use it.

That explaining used to happen at the branch. A banker would walk you through the terms, ask whether you had questions, and notice when something didn't land. In a digital model, that job hasn't gone away. The screen does it now. That's why, with the Simbank app, our rule is that customers should be able to see where they stand without hunting for it. Transaction history is the first thing they see when they log in, and we keep the number of taps to any key action as low as we can.

That might sound like a conversation about convenience. It's really about risk management. A customer who can see their money moving plans their next payment more accurately and is less likely to be blindsided by a balance they didn't expect. And every extra step in the interface means some customers will never get to the information they need.

The practical takeaway for us is this: the app screen is part of the credit process, not just a design problem.

There's another side to this that deserves a straight answer. Making it easy to borrow can't get ahead of the customer's ability to pay it back. When the whole process takes minutes, the responsibility for a sound decision falls mainly on the bank. The customer simply doesn't have time to think everything through, and sometimes doesn't have the financial knowledge to do so. So for us, automation is first about assessing creditworthiness accurately. Speed comes as a result.

I think this is where the next round of competition will be decided. A competitor can match your rate overnight. Fast approvals are becoming table stakes. But whether customers can handle the product after the money is disbursed depends on much slower, harder work: the quality of the models, the design of the screen, and what the bank does with customer feedback.

Digital banking saved customers a trip to the branch. But the branch took with it the person who explained what the customer was actually signing. Now the bank has to do that job itself, through the product, the interface, and what customers see on their screens every day. That's a much harder problem than shaving minutes off approval time.

Aidar Ubyshev, Member of the Management Board, Dos-Credobank OJSC