Apostrophe issues affecting finance applications

sophiedel

Hi, hoping someone can shed some light on this. Our surname is the format, O'Surname.

My husband and I have never had any issues with finance etc. We both paid off our last car finance accounts off and have good credit scores etc. In fact, his score is excellent on all the report checkers.

In the past month, he looked at switching energy providers. They declined him stating that they could not find information on him. They told him to contact TransUnion, however on his Transunion report there is no search showing from the company. he explained to them that he thought it could be an issue with the apostrophe in our name and like magic they started the switch. It was the apostrophe.

Then, due to our family growing, he looked at getting a new car. He looked at all of his reports and affordability scores before applying for the finance. It was declined, with no reason given. He contacted the company and explained that there maybe an issue with the apostrophe in his name, offered to increase the deposit, gave them access to view his bank records which are healthy etc. yet it was still declined on review. The finance company never actually spoke to him directly, only via email with pretty standard non personal responses.

If all the information that the credit agencies hold for him are correct that we can see, could it be that when the finance companies are searching for him they are inputting his details wrong? This is something that we have not encountered before and given that our finances are healthy we are at a loss as to how to retcify the issue.

If you got this far, well done! TIA for any help on this matter.

electriccactus

Are you entering the name with the apostrophe or without?

How does the name appear on the accounts on your credit file?

If you are entering the name with the apostrophe, the simple solution would be to try without and see how that goes. And if you're not entering it, try entering it.

sophiedel

On each report it is shown with an apostrophe and the application had an apostrophe, but from what we can tell with the energy supplier, the character for an apostrophe can differ on different systems and therefore even though we have typed the correct character it may show as say a square on someone else's system.

sausage_time

Sounds like a ASCII versus Unicode issue.  See https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html for hints at the gory details. 

Can you copy/paste the "correct" apostrophe from somewhere you know to be good?

Spaceace

I sympathise, I've also got an O'Surname type name and have encountered the sort of problems you describe although, thankfully, never to the extent that finance applications were rejected.

As noted above, it's often a problem with how the keyboard you're using encodes the apostrophe.  In particular Apple devices (iPhone and iPad) by default use "Smart Punctuation" which gives the 'wrong' format of apostrophe for a lot of online forms.

If you're using an Apple device you can turn Smart Punctuation off in settings:  settings -> general -> keyboards -> toggle Smart Punctuation to off.

They really should publicise the issue more widely as, for those of us with an apostrophe in our names, it's a real pain in the butt until you find the solution.