# 7.5 Financial Data & Data Providers

With privacy in mind, Underwriters have access to a subset of a business's traditional on and off chain financial data in order to make informed decisions.

This data is provided by the "Data Provider" role which can be any entity that collects valuable data on a members’ network. This role could conceivably be played by any traditional financial institution, financial technology companies, accounting software, reputation platforms, or software companies that collect data pertinent to underwriting network members.

Each network operator determines who they allow to act as their data provider or providers. The operator will subsequently determine how much or little data they allow their underwriters to gain access to and should choose their provider with that level of privacy in mind.

The data provider should ideally provide data that consists of payment history, amounts owed and repaid, and length of credit history, qualitative social metrics, etc. Each network's business requirements will be unique to network and the data should reflect those requirements.

In the data provider role, there exists two key layers - the source and the analysis. The source is the raw data whereas the analysis on that data is what provides a summation of the sources and generally depicts the overall health of the members in question.


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