How do credit bureaus work in Canada and the US?
Credit reporting agencies do not share data among them and there is no attempt to keep information in your files in sync among multiple agencies. They simply accept reports from your creditors. In the U.S., most major creditors report to all of the major agencies; a few report only to two, and smaller creditors may report only to one. To find out which creditors are reporting to what agencies, you need to get a copy of your credit report from all three major agencies. Since the agencies may have different data, your credit score may be different from one agency to the next. My TransUnion FICO score is a good twenty points higher than my Equifax or Experian. Also, some credit scores may not be true FICO scores. They may look like a FICO, which is the de facto standard type of consumer credit score in the U.S., but since Fair Isaac & Co. do not release information on how they calculate FICO scores, they are never quite the same as a real FICO, so that causes some variation.
Oh. Credit bureaus are are regulated by the Fair Credit Reporting Act in the U.S. Enforcement is done by the Federal Trade Commission, I believe. It is hard to have (accurate) negative information removed from your credit report because creditors now respond quickly to disputes, so the old trick of disputing something and hoping the creditor doesn’t respond by the deadline specified in law doesn’t work anymore. In some areas, Equifax uses a company called CSC to collect credit information. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say in their FCRA article: “In some areas of the country, however, there is a fourth CRA, CSC Credit Services, which is responsible for information found within Equifax. For example, in Texas, if a consumer tries to dispute information with Equifax directly, it will not affect their credit report. They must go through CSC.
Equifax was formerly CBI, based in Atlanta. They took over the credit reporting operations of CSC, formerly the Pinger System, several years ago. CBI + CSC = Equifax, now one single operation. More to the point, if you are denied credit, the decline letter that you are sent is required by law to include the name, address, contact info of the bureau that supplied the report used to make the decision to deny you credit. If you want a copy of the report or want to dispute anything in it, you contact the bureau mentioned in the letter. I personally have signed many such letters in the past. Back in the day, that would usually be your “local credit bureau” that served your city or multi-county region. In Minneapolis, the Credit Bureau (a Pinger, then a CSC affiliate) had offices on the 7th floor of the Plymouth Building downtown, at the corner of 6th and Hennepin.
How do they keep data in synch? They don’t for the most part. At least today, each country pretty much does its own thing. Credit reports from different agencies within a country will have some variation too, and most banks get their data from one or two credit reporting agencies; there is a fair amount of room for variation on credit reports. Some banks even have their own systems (usually as supplemental information). This lack of real time and synchronized data has exposed a weakness in the financial system and is one of the reasons you are seeing things like bubble markets. If you check the news recently, you will see that CIBC (aka the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce) took a big hit to its finances because it was tied heavily to troubled market in the USA.
Oh. Credit bureaus are are regulated by the Fair Credit Reporting Act in the U.S. Enforcement is done by the Federal Trade Commission, I believe. It is hard to have (accurate) negative information removed from your credit report because creditors now respond quickly to disputes, so the old trick of disputing something and hoping the creditor doesn’t respond by the deadline specified in law doesn’t work anymore. In some areas, Equifax uses a company called CSC to collect credit information. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say in their FCRA article: “In some areas of the country, however, there is a fourth CRA, CSC Credit Services, which is responsible for information found within Equifax. For example, in Texas, if a consumer tries to dispute information with Equifax directly, it will not affect their credit report. They must go through CSC.
