HOLIXORAThe traditional credit evaluation for a small business loan involves balance sheets, income statements, tax returns, and a bank statement review. For established businesses with years of clean financial records, this works reasonably well. For growing SMBs with younger track records, informal revenue patterns, or limited banking history, it produces assessments that are more noise than signal.
The problem is not that these businesses are bad credit risks. It is that the data being evaluated is a poor proxy for their actual repayment capacity.
What Alternative Data Looks Like
Alternative data for SME credit scoring is operational data — the actual behavior of the business rather than its accounting representation. Transaction frequency and consistency. Average order values over time. Customer retention rates. Supplier payment patterns. Inventory turnover. Employee count stability.
These signals are available in systems like Mercora. A retailer who has been running transactions through the POS for two years has generated a dense operational dataset that reflects exactly how their business actually behaves.
The Signal Quality Difference
Behavioral operational data has some properties that make it attractive as a credit signal. It is harder to manipulate than financial statements. It reflects actual customer demand rather than what an accountant recorded. It updates continuously rather than only at reporting periods.
It is not perfect — a business can show strong transaction data and still have structural problems not visible in operations. But used alongside traditional data, it significantly improves the quality of credit decisions.
Building the Infrastructure
The prerequisite for alternative data credit scoring is integrated systems. The data exists only if the business is running software that captures it. This is one of the reasons Holixora built the Credit System as part of the same product ecosystem as Mercora and HRD — the data generated by one system becomes input for the other.
As more Indonesian SMBs adopt integrated business software, the data infrastructure for better credit decisions improves with it.