This is actually something I think a startup could do a really good job at disrupting, but you'd have to have a very high tolerance for both a) schleps and b) dealing with poor peoples' problems.
Billions of dollars are being thrown around at companies where the average level of technical sophistication is Excel spreadsheets and the prototypical competitor is a high-school graduate with an average of N weeks of experience in the industry.
I came to the same conclusion from a slightly different angle: you'd be disrupting an area of financial services which is largely unregulated, full of shady middlemen and the big banks and lenders actually want you to succeed. Even just a platform for buying and selling debt of verified provenance sounds like potentially low risk profits (though I'm less sure about the attractiveness of the customer base...)
That's an interesting angle. The troublesome part is that credit reporting is a two-sided B2B marketplace. You need to convince people to report debts to you AND convince lenders to make lending decisions based on your reports. On top of this, you have to have a B2C facing function for FDCPA and FCRA compliance, and they're very toothy rules to fall afoul of.
All certainly true. I was thinking an interesting angle would be to provide better visibility to the debtors - no limits on the number of times you can check, notifications when things are reported - which might both make the data more accurate (and thus more valuable, one would hope) and make getting in touch with people easier, and make the whole thing less awful.
Billions of dollars are being thrown around at companies where the average level of technical sophistication is Excel spreadsheets and the prototypical competitor is a high-school graduate with an average of N weeks of experience in the industry.