UK Landlord Forum / Life

I am trying to manage my finances well.

I do research into which insurance company I'll go for and I go for reasonable deal.
I have multiple bank accounts and multiple credit and purchase cards and quite a few insurance policies. Some for ease-of-use, some to use special discounts which I clear off at month's end.

It seems that more and more of these companies run periodic credit checks, like Churchill insurance did one before they sent out their renewal quote. I ended up going with someone else who also ran me. I opened a new bank account to take advantage of a £300 switchover offer. They hit me with two credit checks. The list goes on and on.

And whenever I run myself a credit report via experian's web interface, I increase the hit count by one too! Naturally I try to minimise that, but when I see my credit score changing, naturally i want to know what's up.

In total I've had like 40 credit checks against me in the last 6 months or so. A figure I find personally excessive and it's been dragging my credit rating down a CONSIDERABLE amount. I just wanted to rant about this for I see nothing I can do about this short of cancelling my account with experian and to stop worrying about it. Thanks for reading.

Hello Armin,

Good to hear from you again.  Your story reminds me of a recent broadcast on Radio 4's MoneyBox programme.  It concerned the Next store on-line shopping.  Basically Next wanted to get on-line shoppers to sign up to an on-line equivelent of a store credit card.  So it works like this: Customer inputs their details to pay on their normal bank card; Next website uses this info to run a credit check on the customer (without customer really knowing - there's some small print on a web page, but who reads that) and if they pass the credit check then a screen pops up to offer the credit facility.

In principle, I see no problem.  But Next seemed oblivious that using customer data to run a credit check they did not know about would effect credit history / score.  And an error in the way the website was written meant navigating away and back to the checkout scren resultsed in multiple calls to the credit check.  And several Next on-line customers got their credit score seriously knocked down as it looked like they were just about to go on a store card credit spending bonanza.

If I recall the end of the story correctly, Next were trying to do the right thing by the people who's complained to them and "reverse" the effect of the credit referals, but it shows how easy it can be to ge a credit score mucked up without actually having failed to pay any debts off!

Dear Iona,

I realise that you have 28 days by law to respond. However, as a customer I find your approach extremely unsatisfactory. It displays to me an extreme disregard for your customers that you as an organisation clearly find it okay to have service levels which stipulate it to be acceptable for a customer to have to wait for many weeks for a reply. This shows you in a very very poor light and I have been extremely dissatisfied with your service. My credit rating has dropped from VERY GOOD to POOR ever since I started using your service.

    I have reduced my unsecured debt by £9000 yet this shows up nowhere.
    I get hit with credit rating reductions by the simple act of using your website.
    You take FOREVER to respond.

And the poor performance is not associated with Credit Expert alone. Last month I tried to use "CheckMyTenant", also by Experian, and it was not fit for purpose at all for it was not sending off emails to the tenants!

Seriously, you should be ashamed for being associated with such an organisation. If I had any recourse aside from writing angry emails, I would absolutely take it for I think that someone should take you to task and force you to clean up your act and provide a service worth paying money for!

Sincerely,

Armin XXXXXXXXXXX

------ Original Message ------
Received: 03:18 PM GMT, 12/29/2011
From: "CreditExpert" <CustomerService@CreditExpert.co.uk>
Subject: XXXXXXXXXXXXXX


    Our Ref: IXG/XXXXXXXXXX

    Dear Mr XXXXXXXX

    Thank you for your email, which we received on 09 December 2011.

    Your Query:

    - Previous Response

    I am sorry if your correspondence has not been dealt with as quickly as you wanted. Although we deal with thousands of queries each day and legally have 28 days to respond to each one, we really do try to reply to every letter and e-mail as quickly as we possibly can.

    Kind regards

    Iona XXXXX
    Senior Customer Service Representative

    Customer Support Centre
    Experian

I started to read this ten minutes ago.  I've only just stopped laughing.  How lamentable an excuse is that!  The law lets us take up to 28 days to reply to you, so we're jolly well going to take that long.  If it wasn't serious, it would be so very funny.

PS: Well done on clearing £9k of debt!!