Paid $600 for a used credit scoring model back in 2019 and it was the best and worst buy of my life | Algorithmic Fairness Debate

Hayden Ellis · 2026-10-17T17:50:03.337874+00:00

Back in 2019 I grabbed a used scoring model for around $600 from a guy in Austin who was shutting down his small lending business. At the time it felt like a steal because it cut our loan review time from two days down to about an hour, but a few months in I noticed it kept flagging the same zip codes over and over. Turned out the training data was mostly from one part of town, so it was basically grading people on where they lived. Cost me another $2k in fixes and a lot of trust with folks who got denied unfairly. These days I tell everyone to check who's in the training data before they buy anything off the shelf, but how do you even catch that kind of bias before it does damage?

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Paid $600 for a used credit scoring model back in 2019 and it was the best and worst buy of my life | Algorithmic Fairness Debate - Free To Speak