How to obtain your credit rating?

Every wondered why sometimes a bank refuses to provide you with that loan despite the fact that you satisfy all their criterion or why sometimes the credit card company refuses to increase your credit limit?

The answer typically lies in the fact that you may have a poor credit rating. CIBIL is India’s first credit information bureau. The CIBIL shareholding pattern is like this :

The CIBIL agency gets the information from its members about any individual person and creates a rating system. In simple words, whenever you go to any bank for taking a loan (car/house/personal), the respective bank contacts the CIBIL agency to verify your credit rating, which is based on your own history of borrowings and payments.

How does the credit report looks like?

The credit report typically looks like this [PDF]. It contains your personal details (like name, phone number, account number, address etc). It also contains the history of your accounts and your borrowing history and the way you have repaid your loans. It also contains the history of banks/institutions that requested for your credit report.

How can you obtain your credit report?

It is simple process.  You need following documents as mentioned on the website ;

It is important to note that there are no authorised agents for CIBIL who can get you the credit report. Check out the message indicated by CIBIL

Why it is necessary for you to get your credit report?

The reason you would want the report may simply be for informational purpose, but typically it will help you in understanding why a certain bank refused loan to you. Also there could be a possibility of your credit information being incorrectly stored in CIBIL data-base. In such case, you could actually contact the respective bank and ask them to make corrections and inform CIBIL of the correction as well.

Is there a security issue since all your information is with CIBIL?

Not really. The information is accessible only to you and the member banks (who already have your personal information). Also the RTI Act does not apply to CIBIL, since it is not a Public Authority.  Also the information is kept securely using state-of-the-art technology.

Check out the information about credit bureau in other countries.