The panellists discussing alternative sources of data for alternative providers of finance at the AltFi Australasia Summit earlier this week were no more than mildly enthusiastic about the new comprehensive credit regime.Clark Butler, CEO of Dun & Bradstreet, told a full house of lenders in an industry that prides itself on the speed and accuracy of its credit assessment algorithms that comprehensive credit reporting is "a half step forward for Australia.""It brings us almost to where the rest of the world has been for quite some time, but is not the be-all and end-all," Butler said.His counterpart, David Grafton, managing director for Experian Credit Services and Decision Analytics in Australia and NZ, said progress to comprehensive credit reporting progress - even though it's been at glacial speed - offers "a very big prize" when it's underway."With comprehensive credit reporting information, credit providers will be able to make much better credit decisions - and it's not just a marginal improvement. We have seen in New Zealand an improvement of 20 to 25 per cent in business," he said."As a bureau we will be delighted to have that additional information but there is a whole lot more types of information that can be used. Social media information, transactional information, and it's important we don't get hung up on comprehensive reporting as the panacea," Grafton said.Kareem Al-Bassam, general manager of PayPal Credit Australia, a role that includes the payments firm's merchant working capital offering launched in late 2014, has been running a hybrid credit model."We took the credit bureau's information, and ran our own credit models and married both the two systems; this gave us a significant uplift in both the quality and the [place along the risk] curve of where we would be able to lend," Al-Bassam said.Butler proposed that further improvement in data analytics should be about "giving power to the consumer, telling the many lending platform operators in the room that they will be well-served if they began their credit assessment program by convincing potential borrowers and investors that the more information consumers and small businesses can provide about themselves, the better deal they will get."