Hack for LA

I like Lyft/Yelp for LA day laborers. But is it something we can do through Text and not a smartphone? Like VoiceMob or twitter where you can text info to update profiles of employers?

Lyft for LA’s day workers, with anonymous payment, integrated Google translate & reputation

Here’s an idea. A lot of us immigrants come to this country because we want to contribute to its economy while establishing ourselves in what we do best. Now, even if we are successful and enjoy an established purchasing power, just by not having established a credit history, we can’t prove this purchasing power to many entities and service providers.

So we have to put money down as security deposits, which not only puts a hold on our liquidity, but sometimes limits our very own spending ability, to the point of rendering certain costs prohibitive. Shops sell less, missing out on an opportunity simply because they can’t run a credit check on you. And the state and federal governments collect less taxes, just because the system is inefficient for us immigrants.

How about we aggregate all our banking data and compile a meta-data-based score on income/outcome? Then we could take into account outstanding loans and credit card payments. All these figures could come from secure bank feeds, and we would just categorize them and compute a score. If government, at least in LA, can back this… It could become a way for immigrants to prove their credit worthiness and contribute more to the economy. No need for social security number credit checks, just an unbiased score based directly on bank accounts. They key would be making this a secure, read-only score that can get privately sent to institutions for review and approval.

We’d be integrating ourselves and others much better, and we’d be innovating on something that even current US citizens can benefit from, as many people have security concerns on giving their SSN. If we do create something more agile and built for the purpose of ensuring trust in credit worthiness, and then have the city government (for instance), run these scripts in their own protected infrastructure, we’d be adding value for so many stakeholders. What do you think?