The US company doesn't operate in the US, and the quote wasn't taken out of context. The context is that 10,000 was way over the 10 or so maximum number of actually valuable points of data.

The whole article is about how utterly useless the vast majority of "data" ends up being, and how they are not used internally to predict if the loan will be paid back.

So you are 100% in disagreement with this article, and forgive me if I trust a nationally published periodical such as Newsweek of a throwaway commenter on the Internet.