Credit scores weren’t called “credit scores” of course.
It would be along the limes of having the church or kingdom or etc’s blessing, or paperwork to indicate you are with a given trade guild or etc.
It came in many different flavors, as many different countries… exist…
Point being that there *were * long before mechanisms for many different villages and cities having an agreed upon mechanism for discerning “can we trust this person?”
The principle of Identification was a very early on problem that needed solving.
If some rando rrolls into your village claiming to be a trader selling official wares of (some other village), how would you know they were who they said they were?
Typically signed documents with an official seal was a good first start.
And that network of everyone agreeing so-and-so networks seals were associated with good traders that sold good wares is your first concept of a “credit score”.
In reality existing banks today assigning people credit scores is just an abstracted system around the fundamentally simple concept of a trade guild.
Everyone trusts the banks mechanisms for scoring.
The banks are involved in all major transactions and seal their official approval on them
And thus everyone participates in the trade guild by performing transactions with their legal tender.
This is sort of a fairly mandatory mechanism, and it’s not even a terribly complex one tbh.
The only thing modern about it is the fact we store people’s scores digitally and can share that info all across the world instantly. Which is very handy.
But it literally is just a number that evaluates “how much can you trust this person with lending them stuff” based on past times they’ve been trusted with important shot that got lent to them.
Credit scores weren’t called “credit scores” of course.
It would be along the limes of having the church or kingdom or etc’s blessing, or paperwork to indicate you are with a given trade guild or etc.
It came in many different flavors, as many different countries… exist…
Point being that there *were * long before mechanisms for many different villages and cities having an agreed upon mechanism for discerning “can we trust this person?”
The principle of Identification was a very early on problem that needed solving.
If some rando rrolls into your village claiming to be a trader selling official wares of (some other village), how would you know they were who they said they were?
Typically signed documents with an official seal was a good first start.
And that network of everyone agreeing so-and-so networks seals were associated with good traders that sold good wares is your first concept of a “credit score”.
In reality existing banks today assigning people credit scores is just an abstracted system around the fundamentally simple concept of a trade guild.
Everyone trusts the banks mechanisms for scoring.
The banks are involved in all major transactions and seal their official approval on them
And thus everyone participates in the trade guild by performing transactions with their legal tender.
This is sort of a fairly mandatory mechanism, and it’s not even a terribly complex one tbh.
The only thing modern about it is the fact we store people’s scores digitally and can share that info all across the world instantly. Which is very handy.
But it literally is just a number that evaluates “how much can you trust this person with lending them stuff” based on past times they’ve been trusted with important shot that got lent to them.
Unga lent Bunga his stick.
Bunga broke Ungas stick.
Unga tells whole village what happened.
Now no one will lend Bunga a new stick.
Credit score.