In June 2023, all four of India’s authorised credit bureaus were fined around ₹25 lakhs each for maintaining inaccurate and incomplete information about their customers
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on January 2, 2024 met with the heads of all the Credit Information Companies (CICs) amidst a rise in customer complaints related to their credit information.
India’s four authorised credit bureaus are CRIF High Mark, Equifax, TransUnion CIBIL, and Experian. They each maintain credit-related information of borrowers and assign a credit rating based on information like repayment history, credit mix, credit utilisation ratio, etc. This rating is used by lenders when examining loan and credit card applications. An inaccurate credit report hurts borrowers’ prospects of obtaining a loan or credit card.
In June 2023, all four credit bureaus were fined around ₹25 lakhs each for maintaining inaccurate and incomplete information about their customers.
In the meeting held on Tuesday, RBI Deputy Governor Swaminathan J highlighted six areas for the CICs to focus on to address customer concerns:
- improve the quality of data
- timely redressal of customer complaints
- strengthening of the internal ombudsman framework
- streamlining the process for handling data correction requests
- strengthening of cybersecurity and data privacy through an information security governance framework
- address concerns arising out of the usage of data for consulting, analytics, etc.
Source: Medianama ; Business Standard
