Understanding Credit Reference Agencies
Credit reference agencies collect information about borrowing and payment behaviour and sell it to lenders. They are separate commercial organisations holding overlapping but not identical data.
Why the differences matter
Not every lender reports to every agency. An account visible on one report may be absent from another.
A lender assessing your application may check one agency, or several. You do not usually know which.
The practical consequence is that checking a single report gives an incomplete picture, and an error on the one you did not check can affect a decision.
Check all the main agencies operating in your country. Free access is available in most markets, either statutorily or through the agencies' own services.
What appears on a report
Credit accounts and their payment history, typically for six years.
Public record information such as judgments, bankruptcies and insolvency arrangements.
Electoral registration, which lenders use to confirm identity and address.
Search history, distinguishing hard searches from applications and soft searches that do not affect scoring.
Financial associations linking you to anyone with whom you hold a joint account.
Common errors worth looking for
Accounts you do not recognise, which may be fraud or may be misattributed.
Settled accounts still showing as open or in arrears.
Addresses you never lived at, which frequently indicate a data mix-up with someone of a similar name.
Duplicate entries for the same debt, particularly after it has been sold to a collection agency.
Financial associations with former partners that should have been removed.
Missing electoral registration, which is easily fixed and disproportionately unhelpful.
Correcting mistakes
Raise a dispute with the agency, which must investigate with the lender that supplied the data.
Contact the lender directly as well, since they control the underlying record.
Where a dispute is unresolved, you can usually add a short notice of correction to the file explaining the circumstances, which lenders see when assessing manually.
Improving what the report shows
Pay on time, consistently. Payment history is the largest factor.
Keep revolving balances low relative to limits.
Register on the electoral roll.
Avoid multiple applications in a short period.
Where the file is thin, a small well-managed account builds history, and there is no shortcut for the passage of time.
Be sceptical of services promising to remove accurate adverse information, which cannot be done.
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