Credit report errors caused by bank IT meltdowns

Posted in 'Credit Reports' by Barry Stamp

09 August 2012

Now is a good time to check your credit report, following the recent IT meltdowns at the banks that comprise the RBS Group – namely Royal Bank of Scotland, NatWest, Ulster and Coutts – and also at Nationwide. This is because lenders send an update of credit histories to the credit reference agencies just once a month, and any missed payments will not show up immediately on credit reports – they’ll appear up to 5 weeks after the event.

The RBS Group IT meltdown happened at the end of June, and the ‘glitch’ at Nationwide – where 704,426 account holders had debit payments taken twice – happened on 24 and 25 July – and where 50,000 of its customers had payments bounce.

Richard Lloyd at Which? says, "The banks must do everything in their power to make sure their customers who have been affected by recent IT glitches do not have their credit records damaged."

Both Nationwide and the RBS Group are working with the agencies to try to correct the impact of late payments being recorded on credit reports as a result of their IT shortcomings, but at the end of the day the law puts the onus on us as individuals to check for errors, and the law also gives us the legal right to demand that errors are corrected within 28 days, and also a right to compensation if any distress or damage has been caused by wrongful information.

The reason we set up checkmyfile was to enable consumers to have online access to credit reports – we were the first in the UK to do this by years – and to give independent advice to those who need help in correcting errors.

Barry Stamp is a co-founder of Checkmyfile and is a Chartered Banker and a Fellow of the Institute of Credit Management. He can be contacted at barry.stamp@checkmyfile.com.