More Frequent Credit Score Reports Are Available Now, But They Aren’t Free

TransUnion Cibil, one of the four credit bureaus in India, recently came out with a subscription model where customers can access their credit history and report every day. The bureau is offering the subscription for periods of 1 month, 6 months and 1 year for Rs550, Rs800 and Rs1,200, respectively. While other credit bureaus have also had similar subscription-based products in the past, at present no other bureau offers daily access to updated credit reports as part of a subscription. All credit bureaus provide one full credit report at a time, for a fee.

Some bureaus show it through an account on their own website while some also send a PDF copy of the report to your email. Even if you check the report in your account on the bureau’s website, you are shown the same report till you pay the fee to get an updated version. If you subscribe with TransUnion Cibil, the changes in your credit profile, including your score, will reflect in your report without separately paying for that.

You can check your report every day. But how are frequent revisits to your credit profile helpful, According to the bureau, rather than checking credit score just ahead of a loan application, unlimited access allows consumers to continuously monitor their score. “Some lenders offer discount as high as 1% on home loans (to those with high credit score), which can translate into a full year’s worth of EMIs,” said Hrushikesh Mehta, Cibil’s head of direct to consumers interactive. The Cibil interface also has loan offers based on what your credit score is.

From 2017 onwards, the Reserve Bank of India had made it mandatory for all credit bureaus to provide a full credit report free of cost to every consumer asking for it. This means you can get the report for free from each of the four bureaus in a single calendar year.

Know how to get your report here. So why pay for a report that is available for free, “The reason behind why consumers want to pay and have unlimited access to their credit report is to ensure that there aren’t any errors in their credit history and their credit score does not get negatively affected,” said Mehta. Does this mean your credit score will change each day, based on your repayments, “There could be many factors that can impact the credit score, such as delinquency, utilization, inquiries or derogatory reporting.

Credit score improvement is a gradual process and it may take even a year for the score to improve,” said Rajiv Raj, co-founder and director, CreditVidya, a credit advisory. Let’s say an individual is trying to improve her credit score and wants to monitor her progress. It is possible to access a report from a different bureau every quarter. Though the underlying data that credit bureaus use will remain the same, they have their own algorithms and the score may vary to some extent.

“Since now all the lenders are supposed to submit data on their borrowers to all credit bureaus, such anomalies will be minimal. There could be a remote possibility when a derogatory information is not reported on a customer, she may get a higher credit score in one bureau with a lower one in another,” Raj said. Moreover, some credit bureaus have entered into tie-ups with fintech companies to provide free credit scores to consumers. Some fintech companies also send monthly updates once you take a free report through them. However, this comes at the ‘cost’ of sharing information with the fintech companies.

There are many features of credit monitoring that are great whether you are trying to repair your credit or already have outstanding credit. Each of these features can benefit you in a different way. For those with good credit, a monitoring service will help you avoid Identity Theft and allow you to monitor changes in your credit score.

For those struggling to build credit or repair bad credit, you can determine the negative items affecting your credit record and monitor your credit score for changes as you make efforts to repair your credit. For those of you with bad credit, you most likely will want to monitor your FICO score as you attempt to fix your credit. The FICO score is the score most widely used by lenders when ascertaining whether to approve you for a credit card or loan.

This is important to note when shopping for a credit monitoring service as many products will give you their own credit score and not a FICO score. When creditors report to the credit agencies, they are not obligated to report to all 3 of the national credit reporting agencies. For this reason, it would be a good idea to get a copy of your credit report from each credit reporting agency. This will allow you to get an insight on which of your creditors are reporting to which credit reporting agencies.