HSBC and Nova Team to Help UK Immigrants Boost Their Credit

British banking giant HSBC and Nova Credit want to let U.K. immigrants improve their credit.

The partnership, announced Monday (Sept. 18) in a news release provided to PYMNTS, lets customers who are applying for an HSBC U.K. credit card online employ Credit’s Nova Passport technology to share their credit history from a dozen countries.

The release notes that HSBC is the first bank in Great Britain to offer this service, coming at a time when the U.K.’s immigrant population accounts for 95% of the U.K.’s net population growth, with that figure projected to grow to 100% by 2025.

However, these new arrivals “can face real and unique hurdles when settling into their new lives in the U.K. — from struggling to set up essential services due to lack of local credit history to juggling finances between locations and understanding tax considerations,” said Madhu Kejriwal, HSBC’s head of unsecured lending.

Collin Galster, Nova Credit’s head of international, adds that with England’s population growth coming from migration, “businesses cannot win without a dedicated strategy to better attract and retain this highly prized, yet underserved segment.”

The program is thus far open to immigrants who come to the U.K. from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Dominican Republic, India, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Philippines, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, the release said.

The partnership follows Nova Credit’s collaboration in July with FinTech Earnest to offer private student loans for international students, who account for almost 5% of the student population at U.S. colleges and universities.

“Beyond being accepted to these institutions, financing their study overseas is the most challenging step for students pursuing education abroad,” the companies said at the time.

“While 50 percent of students fund their education through personal savings, family funds, or alternative methods, such as work-study programs, there is increasing demand for private loans to offset education costs.”

But access to loans is limited, the companies said, chiefly due to a need for cross-border credit reporting across international markets.

PYMNTS examined some of the financial barriers facing immigrants earlier this year in a conversation with Roy Ng, co-founder and CEO of Bond, who migrated to America from Hong Kong as a boy.

He told the story of how his mother, who had no credit profile in the U.S., struggled to find a credit card that she could use to make purchases at any store, but found herself stuck with a Sears card, which could be used only at that retailer.

“A lot of people, not only immigrants, have a challenge because they’ve never built credit in the past,” Ng said. “There’s a little bit of a [vicious circle, wherein if] you can’t build that credit profile in the beginning, you’re never going to have great credit.”