Banks talk about trust, credit and risk all the time. So do we here at Movenbank, but we talk about it in a different way.

Traditional banks discussion of trust, credit and risk is about – Do we trust you? Do you deserve credit? What is the risk of providing you with money? It’s all about me and whether I want to deal with you.

At Movenbank we’re turning that around.

We want it to be all about you and whether you want to deal with us.

So we look at your trust. We work out from your trust if we can give you credit. And we do that by working out the risks involved through you allowing us to see more about your life through your social networks.

Here’s how we are looking to do it.

You may have noticed that as you sign up for Movenbank, you provide us with access to your Facebook profile for example. Why?

Because we are social? Sure. Because we believe in social media? Absolutely.

We’ve talked about all of this before in our recent blog post To Facebook or Not to Facebook.

But most importantly, we use social media – not just Facebook, but Twitter, PeerIndex, Postrank and more – to see how influential you are. A little bit like Klout.

Klout measures your influence online using data from your social networks. Anywhere you have an online presence, you have the opportunity to influence people by creating or sharing that inspires actions such as likes, retweets, comments and more. The more engagement your posts receive, the more influential you are. Klout uses this information to provide you with a Klout Score that measures your overall influence.

Movenbank does the same, and use services like Klout to assess how you behave and how influential you are. The more behavior of the right sort and influence you demonstrate, the more we like you.

By way of example, think about four people.

Let’s call them Matt, Jessica, Ashley and Alisha.

Matt has a FICO score that shows he’s credit worthy and has 120 friends on Facebook, but doesn’t use Twitter or LinkedIn much. His Klout score is in the low 20s, and he’s in a good demographic.

So banks like Matt, and offer him credit cards, debit cards, deposit accounts, loans. You name it.

We’d do the same.

Jessica is similar to Matt, but defaulted on a loan a few years ago as a student and has black mark against her name. The banks therefore offer Jessica no loans or credit facilities of any substance, and just treat her pretty poorly.

But Jessica uses Facebook actively – she has over 500 friends, with many sharing news and views, likes and dislikes with her. Her friends include some pretty good influencers too – three of her facebook network are linked to over 1,000 people and one is an SVP in one of the largest companies in America. That one is her aunt, as it turns out.

We like Jessica’s online profile, so we offer Jessica a credit card and loan facilities because she’s got some social influence.

Then there’s Ashley. Ashley’s a bit older than Matt and Jessica, but he lost his job a few years ago. Then he lost his house. Ashley’s suffering. The bank foreclosed and now he can’t get any opportunity to get new things started.

But he has an idea. He wants to launch a new business that makes funky trainers that tweet and check-in on foursquare as you run.

Sounds stupid, but don’t be fooled. According to LinkedIn, Ashley has a heavy influence on some potential investors who are sniffing around the ‘Tweener’, as he calls it. The only thing is he has a problem. The mainstream financial service providers don’t want to know him.

Here at Movenbank though, we love Ashley.

We love Ashley because we can see he’s on the cusp of a breakthrough. But we can’t just give Ashley all the things he wants, so we offer him a deposit account and a limited loan facility to get the business started. The loan facility increases over time, as his Klout increases.

You see how it works.

Finally, we come to Alisha.

Alisha’s a lovely young, optimistic person, born in 1994. This year is her eighteenth birthday, and she’s off to university. Great. However, financial FICO scores show nothing about her, so she gets the usual deposit account for a student.

Not with Movenbank. At Movenbank, we like Alisha too.

We like her for having a lot of facebook activity and friends, Klout and more, but we also like her because her social activity shows that she’s a caring, charitable and a trust person. Her work with Help the Aged and Save the Children show’s that – Alisha runs regular 10k’s for them – and she has the badges on Foursquare that show that she’s a leader, not a follower.

So, at Movenbank, we give Alisha a bit more financial flexibility than she would normally receive as a student. Not much. Just a bit more credit, tightly coupled to our ‘Spend, Live, Save Smarter’ financial goals and budgeting app to ensure that she doesn’t run off the rails. We just want her to know that we want her custom, that we care about her as a person and that we believe she will be responsible.

The whole point of this is that finance has traditionally been one-dimensional.

The old way of doing money was to just look at your financial behaviour, and provide you with good or bad marks based upon that history. You’ll know this as your FICO score. You – as just a number. Most banks don’t get to know you too well, making their trust judgments based on this limited, point-in-time information.

At Movenbank, however, we’ll take the care to get to know you and our relationship will grow every time we interact with you. We will use financial scores but in addition we add into that number a healthy view of who you are as a person. That’s why your social credibility is just as important to us as your financial behaviour.

It’s why we will be using a scoring system called CRED.

CRED – It’s all about your credibility, your behavior and your influence. Just like in real friendships, trust is built by positive actions. So the more responsibly you manage your money, paying your bills on time, meeting your set goals, the more likely Movenbank is to provide the credit you need. Just as importantly however, if not more so, is that the more you are trusted by your friends, colleagues and family through your social activities, the more likely Movenbank is to trust you to behave responsibly too.

Watch this space as we’ll tell you more about CRED and how it works over time.