My credit report from Checkmyfile is not generated correctly. What to do?

Have you been an exemplary borrower for many years, always paying your obligations on time? Perfect - your credit score, which is a point assessment of your credibility as a bank customer, should be very high. However, it may happen that your credit report generated by checkmyfile contains errors. Don’t panic! We’ll take care of solving your problem right away and make sure everything is correct.

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What symbols are found on a Checkmyfile credit report?

Sample credit report from Checkmyfile

The first marker is OK. This is by far the best thing you can find on your report, as it is a signal that the payment was made on time.

Your report may also show S or SF, meaning “settled” and “satisfied”. This is information about the closure of your account, from which point a period of six years passes. After that time, records are removed from the database, which can have both a positive and negative effect on your credit score. Both tags are neutral in principle - it is your repayment history that matters.

Sometimes you will also reach the symbol PS, or partial settlement, in the document. Usually, this is simply a settlement to reduce the amount of the debt, and the PS label has no negative effect on your credit score.

The symbols 1,2,3,4,5 and 6, represent months of delay in paying the installment. Keep in mind, however, that the digit “1” may appear even if you are a few minutes late in paying your obligation. On the other hand, the number 6 will appear both if you don’t pay your bill for six months and, for example, 10 months. While a one-time, one-month delay should not be a major problem and will not lower your credit score noticeably, 3 months or more is already a very serious offense.

D, or “default” has a very negative effect on your checkmyfile report. Such a label can appear both for a loan that has not been repaid for many months, and for an account where for some reason the SF label is not applied . This is one of the more common scoring system errors, so if you come across it, be sure to react.

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DA is another designation you don’t want to find on your Checkmyfile report. “Debt assigned,” as the acronym expands, is simply the sale of a debt to a collection agency, which usually means very serious financial trouble for the borrower.

VT, understood as voluntary termination is a situation in which the borrower ends his commitment ahead of schedule, for example, by surrendering the covered long-term lease before its scheduled termination. Voluntary termination is unlikely to lower your credit score.

AR, or arrangement to pay, informs us of a settlement made on the lender-borrower line. This is a rather worrisome signal, indicating that the bank’s customer is in financial trouble and, surprisingly, AR can lower a credit score more than a monthly or even two-month late payment.

U, unclassified, usually applies to freshly established accounts with no recorded activity. Unclassified status does not affect your credit score. A fairly similar indicator is IN, or inactive - it does not affect your score.

The last indicator, which is NR (not reported). This is a neutral signal and simply means that the lender has not provided updated data to the rating agency. You don’t have to worry about it.

We took all the information directly from the checkmyfile website.

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I closed my account and my credit score dropped. What to do?

First of all, it should be made very clear that closing a credit account, i.e. one to which a credit card is assigned, can negatively affect your credit score, and this is perfectly normal. Note also that although your credit score will go down, it will not affect your rating in the eyes of bank analysts, who, as a rule, evaluate each application individually. A slight weakening of the scoring will clearly be due to the closure of the account, and as long as no arrears were created in the process or the “default” label did not appear in the report, for example, due to an outstanding limit on the card, absolutely nothing bad will happen.

How do I report an error on my credit report in Checkmyfile?

It may also turn out that your credit report is outright wrong - from time to time it happens that although you paid your installment on time, the system recorded a delay. While a single situation of this type is unlikely to ruin your score, we understand that you may want to fight for every possible score to maximize your chances of getting a really good credit offer.

Notice of correction, as the procedure for reporting an error is called, involves submitting a short message of no more than 200 words in which you explain the situation to your lender. Unfortunately, over the years, the importance of notices of correction is succinctly declining and many lenders treat them as excuses for lack of diligence (source: checkmyfile).

However, if there has been a situation where your credit score has been lowered through clearly no fault of your own, for example, due to identity theft, do not wait and immediately contact the credit rating agency that noted the situation in your file. Each company is required to note your intervention and must include the document you submitted in your credit report. What’s more, a notice of correction will never adversely affect your credit score, it may only increase the time it takes to analyze your credit application, which seems like a low price to pay for a possible large financial benefit.

When is it a good idea to report a credit report error on Checkmyfile?

Well, contrary to appearances, it is not always justified.

The algorithm that calculates the value of your credit score is extremely complicated - credit rating agencies invest huge amounts of money in the development of software for estimating credit risk and employ hundreds of specialists for this purpose. However, we know that each of these companies takes into account the human factor, and a minor late payment of your water bill is unlikely to determine whether you will be able to get a mortgage or not.

It makes sense to report mistakes when you have accumulated several, or your situation is really bad - having a credit score of 500, fighting for each additional point is as justified as possible, as it is a way to get credit offers. Differences in lending rates between banks can be as high as 2 percentage points per year, which, if you’re financing for £250,000, translates into up to £400 higher installment.

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