1. A method of assessing credit risk of a borrowing party in an on-line lending environment, the method comprising: receiving a request from a lending facilitation service to determine an assessment score for the borrowing party; identifying a social networking service that the borrowing party is associated with; verifying the borrowing party on the social networking service; providing a web page component for installation on the borrowing party's user profile of the identified social networking service; receiving borrower data comprising borrowing party's user profile data and social networking connection data identifying additional user profiles linked to the borrowing party's user profile collected using the web page component; analyzing the social networking connection data of the received borrowing party's data to determine age and activity of each first level connection of additional user profiles linked directly to the borrowing party's user profile on the social networking service; calculating a base assessment score for the borrowing party's profile; storing the borrowing party's user profile data and base assessment score in a user profile datastore; determining an assessment score for the borrowing party based on the base assessment score and the base score weightings of the first level connections; and storing the assessment score in the borrowing party's profile.