Credit Information Corporation (CIC) Releases New Guidelines, Requirements for Online Registration of Financial Institutions
Credit Information Corporation (CIC), the country’s public credit registry and repository of credit information, recently issued changes to its requirements and guidelines to accommodate contactless and paperless registration of its submitting financial institutions. The entire process may now be done online and without the need for hard copies to be submitted.
CIC Circular No. 02, series of 2021 aims to guide submitting entities (SEs) to a standardized and streamlined process of registration which now requires less documents and less time to accomplish.
Under Republic Act No. 9510 or the Credit Information System Act (CISA), submitting entities are financial institutions that provide credit facilities and are required by law to submit both positive and negative credit data of their clients to the CIC database.
“As of date, we have 606 submitting entities in production and other lending entities—numbering over a thousand—are still in the registration phase of onboarding for submission. We streamlined and simplified the entire registration process so we can stay true to our mandate of providing reliable and standardized information on the credit history of borrowers,” CIC President and CEO Atty. Ben Joshua A. Baltazar said.
Registration requirements
To be registered, submitting entities (SE) are required to submit their Certificate of Registration, Articles of Incorporation or Articles of Cooperation, and their Secretary’s Certificate, to the CIC’s Data Submission Team for review.
Once verified and found eligible, the entity will receive a link to the CIC’s Online Submitting Entity Information Sheet (SEIS) which will automatically generate the documents for signature of their authorized representative.
Upon validation of the submitted documents, the CIC will assign a provider code to the SE, together with the credentials to access the Covered Entity (CE) Portal where the SE shall encode its batch operators or the designated persons to submit data to the CIC.
“These changes apply in full for new registrants but for SEs that are already registered, there is no need to resubmit the requirements. They just need to update their SEIS through the CE Portal, which shall automatically generate the needed forms and templates such as the Secretary’s Certificate,” the CIC PCEO explained.
The said requirements shall serve the same purpose should the submitting entity become eligible to access the CIC database as an accessing entity.
Ease of Doing Business
The said move is also in line with the CIC’s commitment to support the government’s thrust on improving the ease of doing business in the country pursuant to R. A. No. 11032 or the “Ease of Doing Business and Efficient Government Service Delivery Act.”
The CIC database remains the most comprehensive with diverse set of contributors from across the country including universal and commercial banks, rural banks, thrift banks, credit card issuers, lending and financing companies, cooperatives and cooperative banks, microfinance institutions (MFIs), savings and loans associations, insurance companies, and even government financing institutions (GFIs) such as the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS).
As of end of July 2021, CIC houses the credit data of 28 million borrowers or unique individuals with 97 million contract data composed primarily of installment transactions with 72.4 million records, followed by credit cards at 23.3 million, and 1.2 million non-installment transactions.
“Given all the new policies and reforms that the CIC is implementing including this streamlined online process of submission, the public can expect wider and more consistent credit reporting compliance from financial institutions which will result in improved data quality,” the CIC PCEO ended.
The Credit Information Corporation (CIC), a government-owned and controlled corporation, was created by Republic Act No. 9510, otherwise known as the Credit Information System Act (CISA). The primary mandate of CIC is to establish a comprehensive and centralized credit information system for the collection and dissemination of fair and accurate information relevant to, or arising from, credit and credit-related activities of all entities participating in the ecosystem.
