Credit Information Bureaus and 'CIBIL'

No. CIBIL maintains account information of various loan customers and credit card customers, whether they are defaulters or not. The information comprises their name, address, monthly repayment track record, outstanding amounts, etc.

Only borrowal accounts, i.e. those customers who have availed of a loan or a credit card from a CIBIL member are reported to CIBIL. Details of liability accounts such as savings, fixed deposits and recurring deposits are not shared with CIBIL.

CIBIL is a repository of credit information and in the consumer segment it provides information on the various loans availed of and cards held by an individual from a member bank. Its commercial report covers the credit availed of by non-individuals.

CIBIL only reports loan and credit-card information such as repayment track, loan type, amount outstanding, loan amount disbursed, various dates, etc. The report also contains a customer's personal information like name, address, date of birth, phone number(s), passport number, voter's ID number, PAN, etc. In a commercial credit report the inputs are similar but include some additional details pertaining to the commercial entity like legal constitution, registration number, etc. The credit report does not provide any opinion or comment on whether a loan should be extended to a customer. It reports the facts that its member banks and financial institutions have reported.

The credit report shows account information such as repayment record, defaults, type of loan, amount of loan, etc. of the customer. This information facilitates prudent decision-making when the credit underwriter processes the loan/credit-card application.

A customer will be able to build a good credit history by proper financial planning and by maintaining a good track record of repayment of dues for loans / credit cards.

The information is contributed by banks and financial institutions that are members of CIBIL.

Member banks contribute to CIBIL on a monthly basis data of all their customers who maintain a loan/credit-card account with them. Hence a customer's name cannot be removed from CIBIL's database.

A credit report reflects only credit information reported by member banks. Hence, details of loan applications are not available in the credit report. However, information about the number of times a CIBIL report has been generated can be obtained from the “Enquiries” section in the CIBIL Report.

Approval or rejection of a credit application depends on the bank's policies. Rejection by one bank on the grounds of the CIBIL report might not imply rejection by another bank.

According to the loan agreement with ICICI Bank signed by the borrowing customer, the Bank can indeed share the data with CIBIL.

The CIBIL report has information of loan/credit details of the borrower only. Therefore, for a retail customer, it would not matter if someone in his/her family has defaulted. If the customer's repayment track record is okay, his/her credit score will not be affected by that of his/her family members.

Customers' account information is sent to CIBIL month on month for update into CIBIL's database. It takes generally 45-60 days from the month-end to update the record in CIBIL's database.

Member banks report data to credit bureaus on a regular basis, thus in case of a delinquent customer, if a customer has cleared all of his/her over dues in the current month the repayment track in his/her credit report will be updated from current month onwards. Please note that the records for the previous period will, however, continue to reflect the past behaviour.