Insurance comparison sites doing credit checks?

fozzie888

Hi,

Can someone please clarify for me - when you do an insurance comparison, and they do a credit search, does this affect your credit? I found an old thread here: forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=166957 (sorry, can't do links)
which suggests that they are just searches and don't affect your rating because it's not an application for credit, but I just want to make sure, because my partner swears some of his car insurance searches have shown up as negatively affecting his credit on Experian/Credit Expert and he found this (American) site:
4autoinsurancequote.org/uncategorized/your-credit-score-and-auto-insurance-quotes/

If anyone could shed some light that would be great...

kingstreet

Comparison sites don't carry out credit checks as far as I know. If you go into the insurer's site, they may carry out an address check to verify your residence and this will show on your credit file as "unrecorded enquiry" and this is not visible to anyone other than you.

If anything has changed in this respect, hopefully one of the motor insurance practitioners on here will contradict me.

keith1950

Hi, just checked my Creditexpert ( Experian ) account and my past life insurance applications have been recorded as a variety of things such as :-

IDENTIFICATION : GENERIC CHECK

UNRECORDED ENQUIRY

INSURANCE QUOTATION

but not a full credit search.

InsideInsurance

Been a while since dealing with comparison sites but back in my day if a customer did a quote directly on the insurers website a credit scoring was done and this was a rating factor (effectively mainly around how much of a fraud risk you are). Given you can be getting 60+ quotes from an aggregator credit checks were not conducted for those coming via that medium but the aggregators themselves didn't do one either.

The credit checks that were used were of the sort that should not impact any applications for credit elsewhere.

Given the amount of insurers now doing credit checks has increased it could be that some aggregators are now doing them but having recently used a couple of aggregators for both my home and car insurance there are no footprints showing on my files from them.