3 ms·

I can only speak of Germany, where we have the equifax-like SCHUFA. > somewhere buried in the terms and conditions is a consent for a credit check. That’s luc

I can only speak of Germany, where we have the equifax-like SCHUFA. > somewhere buried in the terms and conditions is a consent for a credit check. That’s luckily not allowed (as many other burial tactics) and has to be very visible and explicit. Though in the end that doesn’t change much because it’s not as if you have a choice (outside of saying no thanks to the whole thing) > which suggests the same dynamic would exist in Belgium. It doesn’t in Germany. If they don’t know you at all (= no contact with the banking system whatsoever), you are rated higher risk, but just having a bank account for some time is enough to have a good score. Until data protection laws came along, they even charged you to see your own data, nowadays at least you get it free once per year. IMO the biggest differences are the lack of having to "build credit", the incidental lack of an SSN that can be leaked, and the lack of companies allowing someone to wrongly take out a loan in your name and somehow making it your issue instead of theirs.

sam_lowry_ 4y ago
In Belgium, you have National Number which is basically YYMMDD-XXX-CC where YYMMDD is the birth date XXX is the sequence number of a newborn that date or one of the yet unused numbers for foreign-born CC is the mod 97 of 2YYMMDDXXX for those born over 1980 or YYMMDDXXX for the others which means that it is easy to remember and not really a secret, unlike SSN. As a side note, local bank accounts, wire transfer reference numbers, and company numbers also follow the same pattern of 9..10 digits + mod 97. Compared to the Luhn algorithm for checksums used in the rest of ther world, these are a real joy to see and use. With so much fuzz about Estonian digital state, I wonder why Belgium does not get the much deserved praise for implementing the basics just right.

sam_lowry_ 4y ago

In Belgium, you have National Number which is basically YYMMDD-XXX-CC where YYMMDD is the birth date XXX is the sequence number of a newborn that date or one of the yet unused numbers for foreign-born CC is the mod 97 of 2YYMMDDXXX for those born over 1980 or YYMMDDXXX for the others which means that it is easy to remember and not really a secret, unlike SSN. As a side note, local bank accounts, wire transfer reference numbers, and company numbers also follow the same pattern of 9..10 digits + mod 97. Compared to the Luhn algorithm for checksums used in the rest of ther world, these are a real joy to see and use. With so much fuzz about Estonian digital state, I wonder why Belgium does not get the much deserved praise for implementing the basics just right.