A new report has collected data from 30 credit agencies in 23 European countries to identify differences and similarities in credit reporting.
No consensus in sightin
Consumer credit without Schufa? Unthinkable in Germany. But banks looking to expand are asking: what do the credit bureaus in the rest of Europe offer and how do they cooperate? A new report has now collected data from 30 credit bureaus in 23 European countries to identify differences and similarities in credit reporting.
The study by the Association of Consumer Credit Information Suppliers (ACCIS) and the European Credit Research Institute (ECRI) calls for the following: Credit bureaus should collect equally positive and negative data on people's creditworthiness, and also take into account all credit types - from mortgages and unsecured consumer loans down to loans for cell phones or electricity. Today, this is still a long way off, the report notes soberingly. The landscape of credit bureaus in the EU is highly fragmented and there is a lack of incentives for national and international data exchange.
afb as an international bracket
This makes it all the more important that IT systems that automatically decide on loans, such as the afb Credit Management Solution, simply dock onto the systems of the national credit agencies. The afb solution can communicate bidirectionally. On the one hand, it obtains the creditworthiness data for the rating and, on the other, returns the statutory credit and leasing information to the credit bureau system. "We are finding that specialist banks are increasingly looking for a central solution for international use," reports afb CEO Jan Ph. Wieners. According to Wieners, such a system must be open to a large number of national third-party solutions.
This challenge will not change in the foreseeable future, as a common European information database is not in sight. It is more a question of collecting more and more comparable data. ACCIS and ECRI see a need to catch up on positive personal data, for example, which seven of the agencies surveyed do not collect because they are prohibited from doing so by law. In addition, almost half of the agencies surveyed store legal facts such as insolvencies, while only a fifth store general personal data such as income. The majority of agencies make mortgages and consumer loans available, while only a fraction also store cell phone contracts or catalog orders.
Another important finding of the study is that the EU countries have not yet agreed on the terms and conditions of a loan extension.
