Apart from the fact I’m skint what else does a company or institution see if they ran one on me.?

As a shop, we used to just see, Yes or No.

If it was declined, there was never a reason.

I have no debt at all, not even money owing on a credit card and mine is 517/720 and according to what I’m informed, I have a very poor credit rating. If that’s so, how come some people have a credit ratingin the 8-900 bracket?

I don’t work in credit control but have seen quite a few reports and they are often specific to a particular business.

So a company could request average balance or available credit as well as the more general number of credit accounts, any defaults type stuff.

They may then apply their own credit score based on the data they feel is relevant to them which could be different from a figure another company calculates. Its part of the process of selecting the most profitable/least costly customers.

sign up for noddle. it’s free and then you can see too.

But in summary:

Credit cards, mortgage & store finance/ credit. Amount owed, payment received month by month.
Bank accounts monthly balance (usually a couple of months backdated)
Other credit checks – Just been through remortgage so this runs to 4 pages on mine!
Old addresses (from bank accounts)
People who lived at above addresses.

Your browser history.

Also every post you’ve ever made on here.

Your entire personal browser history.

Also every post you’ve ever made on here.

I have no debt at all, not even money owing on a credit card and mine is 517/720 and according to what I’m informed, I have a very poor credit rating. If that’s so, how come some people have a credit ratingin the 8-900 bracket?

Do you borrow at all? Remember, it’s a credit rating, so if you don’t ever borrow any credit, that can effect your score.

I checked mine free using MoneySavingExpert’s new tool and it was as good as it could be(999? whatever the top is).

I use my credit card for between £300 – £500 each month and pay off in full. I’ve also had a bike on finance which I paid off without missing a payment.

You might have something nasty on your history that would be worth looking into.

@cyclingwilly – it’s a score on how likely you are to keep up with the payments. If you have never had a loan or taken on debt then there is no history to check so the lender has no way of knowing if you are a high or low risk.

You will have a score depending on your bank account/savings but it won’t be as high as someone who’s got a mortgage or car loan and is meeting the repayment schedule.

I had a derogatory from BT in mine. Had to phone BT and get it removed, BT agreed with me that it was wrong and they would get it removed, but in true BT fashion they didn’t.

I had to contact the credit check company and dispute it, they contacted BT who never got back to them so they just deleted it from my record.

The short answer is that it depends.

What are you (theoretically) applying for, and is it a hard or soft search?

Signing up for Noddle/Clearscore/any credit check site is worth doing, it’s not uncommon to find inaccuracies or things that may be negatively affecting your credit worthiness, and it’s useful to check occasionally for any fraudulent activity.

It’s a complex thing, it’s not really a case of what can they ‘see’ that depends on the who is looking, their position within their organisation and the job they do – most users will only see, Pass / Fail and sometimes ‘Refer’.

Scores are meaningless, they’re created by the finance agencies to up-sell worthless products as consumers have become a better income source these days. Banks/Finance Co and CC Companies compile their own ‘scores’ based on raw data, you’ll never, ever, ever find out these criteria, it’s a closely guarded secret – the only ‘skill’ to lending money is to find the sweet spot between being too safe and never passing a customer, and being too brave and losing it all to bad debt, in any case it’s so complex it needs software to calculate it all.

As to what data they hold:

KYC Data or ‘Know Your Customer’ – it’s all the vital stats – DOB, Address, Full Name, Address – no mothers maiden name etc, only data about that person so you can check it against the application your given – there also a system that tracks all this – you might have noticed about 10-15 years ago for the first time ever banks had to ask for a lot of ID, and then a few years later that stopped again – KYC system does it digitally now, if there are any gaps or inconsistencies you might have to provide ID (sometimes if you’ve just moved house etc)  and often create the ‘refer’ answer.

CIFAS or ‘<span style=”color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px;”>Credit Industry Fraud Avoidance System’ although they do more than that now so it’s technically ‘Cifas’ as it’s become a word, but that’s not important – if you’re a victim of identity fraud, they’ll attempt to stop it / help you, they’re very good these days and stop a lot of fraud. helped by KYC, because in the past all fraudsters had to do was get a photocopy of a driving licence / passport and would pass a lot of remote checks.</span>

NOCs are ‘Notices of Correction’ if something goes wrong you can actually write a little statement to explain why and they HAVE to read it, it’s not really worth it these days.

Address History, not as simple as it should be, all the addresses you’ve lived in for 6 years, usually in a mixed up, messy way, but it still works.

Most importantly, financial history. Every loan, bank account (with or without overdraft) credit card and lease you’ve had in the last 6 years, plus utilities (some not all), mobile phone accounts (all, as they’re usually credit deals really) plus others I’ve forgotten about. It will show the type of facility (loan, bank account, cc etc) date started, amount (in case of loans) current balance and term. After that there’s a row of 9 numbers. The first 8 are the last 8 months repayment history – a ‘0’ means a faultless payment, a ‘1’ means a single missed payment – they only go up to 6, a ‘8’ is actually a code of ‘Default’ which means 6 payments have been missed and they’re given a naughty marker. The last number is the highest number of missed payments in a row since they took it out. You want to see lots of lines of 9 0s in a row, a couple of 1’s doesn’t really matter as ‘life happens’ sometimes.

Other markers include ‘Arrangement’ which means something went wrong and a deal outside of the original terms was made – not always a bad thing, if someone lost their job, couldn’t make their payments, but instead of ignoring it, they made a deal, and more importantly returned to normal when they were working again, that’s a good thing to me, you can’t blame people for bad luck, some places don’t like them.

and VT ‘Voluntary Termination’  some agreements (HP and PCP mostly) allow you to return the goods at the half-way point without penalty… this always results in a loss for the bank, they’re not meant to be a ‘black mark’ but when I was an underwriter, if I was being asked to finance a car for someone who’d VT’d the last one, or two, or four… would I really want to be the next sucker to let him have a car on the cheap and stiff us with the depreciation? Nah.

Sometimes, as with the BT example above, there’s incorrect data in the system. When we lived at our last house I decided to take up one of those 0% finance deals but since we’d only been there for a year I had to provide my previous address. Bloke at bike shop goes off to check, comes back: “There’s no record of you at that address” (We’d lived there for nine years!) The bike shop were great, I was in their office talking to the credit reference agency for a good while ’til we got to the bottom of things.

It turned out that there was no record of either my wife nor myself at that property at all! I’d had a HP agreement on a car during that time and my wife been paying the mortgage but no, nothing. According to the credit ref agency no-one had been living at that address for the period while we were there.

I ended up just buying the bike with cash.

I bought a tv two months ago on a credit card and anything electrical I buy or over £100, is paid for on a credit card and paid off in full every time.

Honestly, ignore the ‘scores’ they don’t mean a thing.