3 ms·

What's the point of a credit agency if they can't get paid for making their reports?

• shmeeed 3y ago
  They can and do get paid by businesses.
• victorbjorklund 3y ago
  They point of a credit agency is to sell the data about your credit worthiness to OTHERS that are considering giving you a credit so they can make an accurate risk assesment.
  • vdaea 3y ago
    That's a distinction without a difference. Whether the renter or the landlord buy the credit report, the renter will pay for it anyway.
    • JackFr 3y ago
      Well, no. If the applicant is denied they pay nothing.
      • bberenberg 3y ago
        In NYC we have application fees that are non refundable to cover background checks. It’s turned into its own scam where people show rooms to rent, collect deposits, and never run the checks and keep the deposits.
      • 8organicbits 3y ago
        The applicant keeps applying until they are approved, so everyone ends up paying. Being perpetually denied would mean being homeless. Not much of a silver lining.
    • fabianholzer 3y ago
      No, a business (or landlord) is free to spend their own dime on a report and is not entitled to get data about others for free. In the case of landlords it is possible that they ask the potential tenant to hand in a report as a precondition to even make a contract offer. In that case the potential tenant would have to pay for their own data if it weren't for GDPR. The Schufa uses dark patterns to trick people into buying data they legally are entitled to get for free. If you get around their confusing UI (we recently did...) they send you that infamous 30 Euro report for free without much more ado.
• yorwba 3y ago
  They're allowed to charge for the service of assessing a person's credit risk and attesting to it. In the common case you just get a document saying effectively "we have no negative information on file regarding this person". But they also provide what's essentially a vanity service where they give you a more detailed breakdown of the information they have on you. They're also allowed to charge for that. The issue is that under the GDPR, they're also required to provide all the information they have on you, for free. Now this obviously conflicts with their nice side business, so they're trying to herd people towards the paid offering. I don't think making the free GDPR export more prominent would threaten their core service. After all, businesses interested in your creditworthiness don't want to make too many complex decisions themselves, so they'll continue to rely on Schufa's stamp of approval instead of wading through the details of your financial history. (And how do they know you're not hiding something from them?)