[tlb]

In that case of being treated differently (requiring a different amount of downpayment as security), it's probably racist. More common and less controversial is the case when the signals are in different channels.

For instance, when dealing with immigrants, US banks often fail to see any signal at all because their credit reporting only covers US institutions, and they don't know how to verify employment or schooling abroad. So to start making loans to immigrants from any given country, they need to figure out what the signals are (job, schooling, ...) and how they correlate with risk.