Patent Document ID: 8560436
Application ID: 12943720

Base Claim:
1. A computer-implemented method of assessing credit risk of a borrowing party in an on-line lending environment at an assessment system, the method comprising: receiving a request through a computer network from a lending facilitation service to determine an assessment score for the borrowing party; identifying a social networking service that the borrowing party is associated with; verifying the borrowing party on the social networking service; providing a web page component for installation on the borrowing party's user profile of the identified social networking service; receiving borrower data through the computer network comprising borrowing party's user profile data and social networking connection data identifying additional user profiles linked to the borrowing party's user profile collected using the web page component; analyzing the social networking connection data of the received borrowing party's data to determine a respective assessment score and a length of time and level of activity of each first level connection of additional user profiles linked directly to the borrowing party's user profile on the social networking service to provide an assigned weighting for each first level connection to the respective assessment score; calculating a base score for the borrowing party's profile based on the received borrower data; storing the borrowing party's user profile data and base score in a user profile datastore; determining an assessment score for the borrowing party using the base score and assessment scores and assigned weightings of the first level connections having assessment scores; and storing the determined assessment score in the user profile datastore.

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Claim 2:
2. The method of claim 1 wherein for each first level connection the method further comprising: determining a user profile associated with the first level connection; and determining if an assessment score is stored in the user profile store for the determined user profile and can be used for determining the assessment score for the borrowing party.