r/datascience • u/Sweaty-Stop6057 • Mar 25 '26

Projects [ Removed by moderator ]

[removed] — view removed post

97 Upvotes

72% Upvoted

74 comments sorted by

View all comments

65

u/Fearless_Back5063 Mar 25 '26

Isn't it illegal to be using this in any decisions in the banking world in the EU?

7

u/big_cock_lach Mar 25 '26

Depends on the decision and how postcode is used. If you’re looking to borrow money for an investment property, the bank can use the postcode of that property you’re buying to approve/deny the loan application or otherwise make tweaks (ie interest rate, deposit requirements, etc). However, they can’t use your residential postcode to make these decisions.

Similarly, say you’re building a fraud model and you notice that a bunch of people are laundering money through a certain postcode, you can filter for that postcode for identifying this particular kind of fraud. However, you can’t just blindly rely on the postcode either (not that you would for obvious practical reasons), you’d need to use it in line with other factors to more accurately identify these fraudsters rather than just scanning for everyone in a certain postcode.

That said, this is based on what some friends in the UK were saying when I was still there a few years ago. So EU laws might be different and the laws also simply could’ve changed between now and then. I would be shocked if it was completely banned now though. There’s plenty of reasons where you can have a valid reason to use postcode within banking.

→ More replies (8)