And we saw actually the opposite, right? We saw that these are people that actually have very healthy credit portfolios. They've got credit cards, they've got auto loans, they've got a full wallet of credit product.

It's not that they can't get it. And so, you know, it's probably a convenience thing or it's probably a, you know, the ability to split the payments into a manageable set of equal payments, whatever it is.

There's something different that's drawing people to line up a later that type of vehicle.

Welcome back to how to lend money to strangers, the podcast about lending strategies around the world and across the credit life cycle.

Today, I'm speaking to Matt Fabian, head of research and consulting for TransUnion in Canada, which means that we were colleagues for four years or be at long distance.

Matt has 20 years of experience in the financial services and management consulting, including roles in customer analytics, building client strategy, data analytics and modeling, credit cards, insurance and wealth management.

And it's a recognized speaker and contributor to media that includes CBC, BNN, Bloomberg, Globe and Mail.

It's that background plus the fact that he has access to one of the largest consumer credit databases in Canada that make him ideally placed to tell us how COVID has impacted that market.

Let's get into it. You've brought out the credit industry indicator with a five years leading up to COVID, never really breaking out of the 95 105 band or very rarely.

And then suddenly getting 64 MP COVID, do you want to talk about about what the credit industry indicator is and then what can we gather from the huge step and recovery we're seeing?

Is that reflective of what's happening?

So, you know, the credit industry indicator something we've been working on for a couple of years and we've launched it in Canada, the US, India and in Latin America, Hong Kong and South Africa are coming.

And so essentially we've tried to build a model that identifies consumer credit health, you know, at a market level in a single metric and we've taken hundreds of different credit variables and rolled them up into four key.

You want to call them factors and we've kind of looked at the value chain of credit and said, you know, you start on one side, you've got demand.

And so many people are actually looking for credit is that going up or down and then corresponding to that is supply.

And so our lenders satisfying the demand or are they restricting it or, you know, our lenders really seeking to grow acquisition despite lower demand.

And so they're maybe having to dip into higher risk categories to get those customers.

So how do those two play off? And then once you have your universe of consumers that have credit, you know, we look at behaviors and so, you know, are they making payments?

Are they increasing balances? Are they using credit more? Are they using revolving credit? And what does that mean?

And then the final piece obviously is the performance. So is risk going up? Is risk going down? Are we seeing higher delinquencies bankruptcies? That kind of thing.

And so each of those is correlated to one another, crossed many, many variables and they're all interrelated. And so the model is quite complex and it actually looks to figure out what's driving what and which direction to the arrows go.

And then we roll that up into a single number. So what we've seen in Canada is that you know, Canada was relatively flat for a long time.

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