Credit bureau

A credit bureau collects your loan and card repayment history and turns it into a credit score. Lenders check that score before giving you a loan. CIBIL is the best known in India.

What a bureau actually does

Every bank and lender reports your accounts to the bureaus: the cards and loans you hold, your limits and balances, and crucially whether you pay on time. The bureau gathers all of this into a credit report, a full history of how you handle borrowed money, and boils it down into a three-digit score lenders can read at a glance.

The four bureaus in India

Four credit information companies are licensed by the RBI: TransUnion CIBIL, Experian, Equifax and CRIF High Mark. Each builds its own report and score from roughly the same underlying data, so your numbers can differ a little between them. CIBIL is the most widely used by Indian lenders, which is why “CIBIL score” is often used loosely to mean any credit score.

Your rights, and checking it

You are entitled to see your own report, and each bureau must give you one free full report a year. Checking your own report is a soft enquiry and does not lower your score, unlike a lender’s hard enquiry when you apply. It is worth checking now and then for errors, because a wrong entry can drag your score down. See how to check your credit report.