FinRep: A Blockchain Approach for Financial Reputation

Abstract

Financial reputation is the key to obtain credit from formal financial institutions. However, a reliable and customer-driven mechanism for proving one’s own financial mechanism does not exist. We propose FinRep—a sequential record of transactions involving a customer, and registered by that customer himself with the help of intermediary financial institutions. FinRep is implemented as a blockchain-based secure data storage and can be produced by the customer on demand to prove his financial reputation. FinRep provides authenticity, integrity and also power to the customer, on which transactions he wishes to record and share with a credit-issuing institution, thereby providing a certain amount of privacy to the customer. The institution then evaluates the FinRep only for its quality and either accepts or rejects. This paper details the methodology of constructing the FinRep along with the mechanisms for analysing the quality of customer submitted FinReps and discusses the implementation using Openchain.