Mumbai: TransUnion Cibil is asking lenders to submit monthly credit data of borrowers quicker, a top official at the credit information bureau said.
Lenders report credit data of their borrowers to the bureau after every month.
Currently, the data is submitted and updated two weeks after the month end.
“We are working to make sure that the data gets sent to us faster and we want to make sure that data comes to us within a week of every month-end, instead of a fortnight at present," Harshala Chandorkar, chief operating officer, TransUnion Cibil said in an interview.
She said that by and large, every lender submits data on a monthly basis and there are invariably some issues with the data set because some credit accounts would have been missed from being updated by banks and some also get rejected by the bureau because key input fields are missing.
“The bank works on the rejected data and then sends it back to us," she said.
In 2015, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) directed all banks and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) to become members of credit information companies (CICs) and share all credit data with them.
CICs maintain data on borrowings and payment details on a monthly basis.
This helps banks perform due diligence on borrowers before granting them loans and also weigh default risks.
The central bank had also asked lenders to update credit information on a monthly basis or at shorter intervals mutually agreed upon between the lender and the CIC.
Chandorkar said TransUnion Cibil has close to 4,000 institutions as members comprising banks, NBFCs, housing finance companies (HFCs) and credit card companies and covers over 99% of the lending in the regulated sector.
“These institutions contribute information on all loans and facilities they have granted, irrespective of the type or size of the loan. This gets refreshed every month to show the repayment history," said Chandorkar.
Cibil has information on 900-950 million individual credit accounts, including repayment history; it also maintains information on 30-35 million non-individual credit accounts.
Speaking of the credit bureau’s dispute resolution process, she said that TransUnion Cibil has removed most manual interventions.
“We have a dispute resolution system in place where a customer can raise a dispute on our website. Once I have raised a dispute, the system will send those to the banks, who will then make the changes and an updated report goes back to the customer," she said.
According to Chandorkar, while earlier it was easy for someone to take a loan, default and go to another bank, take another loan and default, it is now almost impossible to do that as repayment history is being tracked.
“A lot of times, customers do not have the intention to default but he/she misses payments because of lack of repayment discipline. Cibil is therefore educating people on why is it important that if you have taken a loan or a credit card, you repay on time," she said.
