Credit Score Late Payments

Dazzer15

I paid British Gas bill for gas/ electric late in 2018. It has since been recorded on my Clear Score account as one late payment ie one bill. Checked recently and same entry now recorded as 2 late payments ie gas and electric separate! Have raised Notice of Contention with Equifax via Clear Score. Absolutely outrageous to list as one late payment for more than 5 years then to change it! Vigilance over the credit score mafia called for at all times!

MorningcoffeeIV

May not be as outrageous as you think.

Do you have one utility agreement or two?

Either way, it will have little impact and be gone within a year.

cymruchris

Dazzer15 said:

I paid British Gas bill for gas/ electric late in 2018. It has since been recorded on my Clear Score account as one late payment ie one bill. Checked recently and same entry now recorded as 2 late payments ie gas and electric separate! Have raised Notice of Contention with Equifax via Clear Score. Absolutely outrageous to list as one late payment for more than 5 years then to change it! Vigilance over the credit score mafia called for at all times!

It'll likely have little to no impact now 5 years down the line if the rest of  your credit history is good. Remember credit score isn't a thing. Only you see it. As above - if you had a gas account and an electric account - and missed a payment on both - that's 2 missed payments. That's an accurate reflection of events. If they'd only recorded one previously, that would likely have been an error that they've corrected. Therefore if it is accurate - it's not something you can really complain about, but as I say (and above) at this stage it's not a major factor, and will soon drop off anyway.

Dazzer15

MorningcoffeeIV said:

May not be as outrageous as you think.

Do you have one utility agreement or two?

Either way, it will have little impact and be gone within a year.

Why gone within a year? Was recorded as 1 late payment for over 5 years now it's suddenly become 2. One bill...in 2018 don't believe you could have separate providers ...or?

cymruchris

Dazzer15 said:

MorningcoffeeIV said:

May not be as outrageous as you think.

Do you have one utility agreement or two?

Either way, it will have little impact and be gone within a year.

Why gone within a year? Was recorded as 1 late payment for over 5 years now it's suddenly become 2. One bill...in 2018 don't believe you could have separate providers ...or?

I think we both were under the impression that it was potentially a defaulted or old account - is the account still active? As in you're still making regular active payments? Or was it closed some time ago and marked as 'settled'?

One or two missed payments going 5 years back isn't going to make much difference now if your record since has been impeccable.

bubby08

Hello, on various threads, I have heard many many people reference that a credit score doesn’t exist and is a fictitious algorithm used for marketing purposes such as Experian. However…. If this is genuinely the case how can you legislate for many lenders proving 60 seconds approvals or declines for substantial finance agreements if it is not based on a scoring system. The mortgage aspect I can accept as it goes through an underwriter who I imagine physically reviews your credit file. But for applications which are processed over the phone or online I am struggling to understand how the score is fictitious. 

Thanks 

CliveOfIndia

bubby08 said:

Hello, on various threads, I have heard many many people reference that a credit score doesn’t exist and is a fictitious algorithm used for marketing purposes such as Experian. However…. If this is genuinely the case how can you legislate for many lenders proving 60 seconds approvals or declines for substantial finance agreements if it is not based on a scoring system. The mortgage aspect I can accept as it goes through an underwriter who I imagine physically reviews your credit file. But for applications which are processed over the phone or online I am struggling to understand how the score is fictitious. 

Thanks 

The score you see on Experian or whatever is completely meaningless.  A lender will take your credit data, feed it into their computers, and generate their own internal score.  This has no relationship whatsoever to the CRA score.

Quite apart from anything else, each lender will have very different lending criteria, and will assign different weightings to each element of data - for this reason alone, there cannot possibly be a "one-size-fits-all" score.

A small number of lenders will get a score from the CRA - but even then it's tailor-made to their particular specifications and lending criteria, and has nothing to do with the generic score you see on your report.

bubby08

So you are suggesting that online applications and instant decisions are processed by computers crunching your credit file, analysing it and making a decision based on their own criteria in a matter of seconds?

cymruchris

bubby08 said:

So you are suggesting that online applications and instant decisions are processed by computers crunching your credit file, analysing it and making a decision based on their own criteria in a matter of seconds?

Yes.....

CliveOfIndia

bubby08 said:

So you are suggesting that online applications and instant decisions are processed by computers crunching your credit file, analysing it and making a decision based on their own criteria in a matter of seconds?

Absolutely.  This is exactly how it works in the vast majority of cases.  The lender pays the Credit Reference Agency for your data, that gets churned through their systems, and "computer says yes or no".  Which is why you'll see a hard search on your file - they have to have your data in order to make the decision.  They may give you a "likely indication of acceptance" based on the limited amount of data you put into an eligibility checker, but it's not until they've churned your full dataset that they can say for certain.

As well as the computer saying yes or no, it'll allocate your credit limit (for a credit card application) and APR based on a whole host of complex combinations of the data contained in your file.

Very occasionally the computer will say "maybe", in which case your application would be reviewed by a human being (though this is unusual).  But in the vast majority of cases it's all automatic and takes a matter of seconds, maybe a couple of minutes.

sourcrates

bubby08 said:

So you are suggesting that online applications and instant decisions are processed by computers crunching your credit file, analysing it and making a decision based on their own criteria in a matter of seconds?

Yes, 100%, that`s exactly how the system we have works.