Hard Credit Searches

MABLE

I copied this from Clear Score site. According to them the potential lender has access to your score. However a lot of contributors on this site say differently.

"
Hard searches (also known as hard checks or credit application checks)

A hard search is when a lender takes a full look at your credit report (and score). This type of credit check leaves a mark on your credit report, so whenever prospective lenders look at your credit report they can see you applied for credit (and whether you were accepted).

Most hard searches stay on your report for 12 months (though a debt collection is visible for a period of 2 years)."

tenchy

I think as far as this site is concerned you must take just about everything with a pinch of salt and don't rely on any advice that may be offered. All the time we are told that companies looking at your credit file don't see the score and also don't see if hard searches resulted in a successful application.


Do anyone on here actually know anything at all about credit reporting? Do any members work for Experian or one of the others? If so, maybe they could offer some non-fake advice.

KoshB5

All 3 CRA's generate credit risk scores that they offer to lenders as part of their offerimgs when returning a credit report. In the UK, lenders predominetly generate their own score from your 6 years of credit history, driven by their business model.

So when people on this forum state a CRA score is meaningless to lenders, this is the general case but it isn't true to state a lender can't see a CRA score, they can if they request it.

A lender will generate their score (can be multiple as part of their decision process) based on your history, the things they consider and their relevant weighting is driven by their business model. This is a good link for understanding the categories and weightings that can make up a credit score - http://www.myfico.com/credit-education/whats-in-your-credit-score, whilst from the US the UK market operates in a very similar way.

tenchy

Well I'm none the wiser. It seems like the following: companies don't see your credit score, but some do. Companies pay no attention to it, but some do. Only you see your score, except some companies do as well if they want to. The result of a hard search is not visible, except when it is visible, which is all the time. I asked previously, does anyone here actually know ANYTHING about credit reports?

[Deleted User]

The scores are not visible to lenders.

However, smaller lenders may request a score, based on their specified criteria.

takman

KoshB5 wrote: »

This is a good link for understanding the categories and weightings that can make up a credit score - http://www.myfico.com/credit-education/whats-in-your-credit-score, whilst from the US the UK market operates in a very similar way.

The US credit scoring system is completely different to the UK. In the US almost all companies will use a third party credit score when considering credit applications.

In the UK almost all companies will generate their own credit scores based on data in the reports. So it's a complete different system and each lender in the UK will value different data in the report differently.

MABLE wrote: »

I copied this from Clear Score site. According to them the potential lender has access to your score. However a lot of contributors on this site say differently.

Clearscore are a third party site and use the data from Experian Equifax. No lender will request ANY information from Clearscore so the credit score they generate will not be seen by any lender ever. Lender's request data from the Credit Reference Agencies directly.

tenchy wrote: »

Well I'm none the wiser. It seems like the following: companies don't see your credit score, but some do. Companies pay no attention to it, but some do. Only you see your score, except some companies do as well if they want to.

There have been posts on here from people who work in the industry that confirm that lenders generate their own score based on the information that they are provided from the Credit Reference Agencies and other sources.

Smaller companies may ask the CRA's to generate and supply a credit score for them but they will specify how they want the score to be generated, so it will be customised.
A lender would be pretty silly to use a credit score generated by the CRA's even if they could see it because they won't know how that score it calculated so will not be able to determine the level of risk compared to the score.

tenchy wrote: »

The result of a hard search is not visible, except when it is visible, which is all the time. I asked previously, does anyone here actually know ANYTHING about credit reports?

Here is the answer to this directly from experian:

"The credit report you see is more comprehensive than the one lenders look at (with your permission of course) because only you see the actual names of your current and past lenders. You also see a record of all the searches of your report, regardless of the reason, whereas lenders usually only see searches carried out for credit-granting purposes."

Source: http://www.experian.co.uk/consumer/questions/askjames248.html

Lenders cannot see who searched your report or who provides you with credit. So there is no way for them to know definitively if a hard search has resulted in an approval or rejection.

So they will look at the number of Hard Searches in a set period of time to determine the level of risk.

tenchy

This is all interesting. Thank you. I'm still not sure though. Here we have Clear Score, who are part of the industry, saying one thing, namely that credit granting as a result of a search is visible, whereas the view here is that this doesn't happen. Does anyone have an example of what a lender does see? We can all look on Experian for our own reports, but let's see that side by side with the lender view.

[Deleted User]

tenchy wrote: »

Here we have Clear Score, who are part of the industry, saying one thing, namely that credit granting as a result of a search is visible, whereas the view here is that this doesn't happen.

I'm not sure anyone has said that doesn't happen.

What people have (correctly) said is that lenders do not see WHO has given you credit.

cjmillsnun

takman wrote: »

Clearscore are a third party site and use the data from Experian. No lender will request ANY information from Clearscore so the credit score they generate will not be seen by any lender ever. Lender's request data from the Credit Reference Agencies directly.

One correction Clearscore use Equifax. MSE Credit Club use Experian

takman

cjmillsnun wrote: »

One correction Clearscore use Equifax. MSE Credit Club use Experian

Good spot! Thanks