The business of online reputation

The business of online reputation

The collaborative economy grows along with the need to impose mechanisms that increase confidence among users. A Spanish startup creates a system based on the fingerprint of people who aspire to replace the solvency ratings

Warren Buffett said that we would need around twenty years to build a good reputation and in just five minutes we could ruin it. But we know that we do not currently have so much time for the first. So in the internet jungle, where the boundaries between the real and the virtual world are distorted, trust is the base where relationships are sustained and a key element for everything to work. But who do we trust more? Imagine that you arrive to a big city,

you want to rent a house -although at the moment it seems an impossible mission- and you do not have references of any type. Yes, there are guarantees, payrolls and four-leaf clovers. But suppose we have an online valuation system who decides when something is reliable or not according to their own interests.

It may sound like 'Black Mirror' and that chapter in which Lacie Pound came to a world where everything was measured according to the score that was on social networks. There all were unified and allowed to calibrate their interactions -online or offline- on a scale with different stars.

A social scoring that measures the trust and responsibility of people who have demonstrated their commitment in the past on various digital platforms and who, therefore, are more likely to maintain that behavior in the future. It is one of the booming businesses in the age of social networks : online reputation .

And there comes Traity , an aggregator of social networks profiles and collaborative consumer websites (BlaBlar, eBay, Wallapop, Airbnb ...) that help certify the reliability of each user . This startup from Madrid -created in 2012 by Borja Martín, José Ignacio Fernández and Juan Cartagena- emerges after a bad experience in which the purchase of a computer through the internet never reached its recipient. As a result of this, the machinery was put into operation to give confidence to online transactions, especially among individuals.

"We built an alternative, more social and fairer scoring system, in contrast to the traditional financial scoring used, for example, by banks when granting credit," explains Miguel Ángel Torres, CFO at Innova + of the company. It argues the benefits of Traity - which has ten employees and more than four million users around the world - as a useful tool for other collaborative consumption companies and thus not having to value from scratch the reliability of each user.

 He explains it from some offices in the Plaza de España in Madrid to those who moved a few years ago and who remember the Silicon Valley model with foosball tables, sofas and a football in between. "With reputation we can reduce risks. In recent times we have been improving the algorithms in credits and insurance, "says Torres, who insists on the detail that there is more information on the internet than the insurers would have to make us fit or not when hiring a product.

Currently they have launched aNovel system, although unknown, which implies eliminating the guarantees of housing rents . At the moment they have become strong in Australia in alliance with the financial Suncorp.

«On the internet, there is more information about us than insurers would have when contracting with them»

For experts in the sector, the current bonding system is completely outdated and the loss of liquidity of the tenants is an astronomical opportunity cost. The idea allows tenants to pay a premium calculated based on the monthly installments, the term of the lease and the tenant's reliability.

Rent without paying deposit

All this using an algorithm that measures the reliability of the tenant through his fingerprint and that results in payments that are much lower than those that correspond to current bonds, which are sometimes impossible to assume. Different variables are analyzed, such as the comments and the coherence of their profiles in the SS RRs, as well as the evaluations they have.

Of course, only access to information that the user has provided with consent. The idea is to replicate the model in Spain. The business and technology behind social networks is huge. And in a global market like this one of online reputation and appearances, the other side of the coin arises in the opposite direction: false followers and political spam .