A Financial Association is another individual with whom you’ve had some financial connection – usually a spouse or partner or family member. Once a Financial Association has been created, it will remain on your Credit Report indefinitely, until you manually request to have it taken off.
Because of this, many people check their Credit Report and are greeted by outdated entries from years ago – ex-partners, ex-flatmates (where joint utilities were shared), even ex-colleagues.
If you have a Financial Association included on your Credit Report, their information may be viewed alongside yours whenever you make an application for credit. This can be a good or bad thing, depending on the status of their Credit Report. Put simply, if they have a strong Credit Rating, they can help your applications while, if they have a poor Credit Rating, they may harm your chances of being accepted. Either way though, if the association is no longer applicable, you won’t want to risk it harming your own creditworthiness.
If you’re unsure who’s linked to you as a Financial Association, the first step is to check your Credit Report so you can find out. Our Multi Agency Credit Report is the most detailed in the UK, letting you see complete information from all three Credit Reference Agencies. You can then easily have the Financial Associations removed if they are no longer relevant. You can try us free for 30 days, then just £14.99 per month, which you can cancel quickly online at any point.
How to remove a Financial Association
- Create or log into your checkmyfile account. You can then view your Multi Agency Credit Report, which includes any Financial Associations, and raise a dispute to have them taken off.
- Once your report has been generated, click on the ‘View’ button next to the Financial Association you would like removed. Click on the small envelope icon that appears and follow the on-screen instructions to submit a disassociation request.
- Once you’ve submitted the disassociation request, we will raise it as a dispute with the relevant Credit Reference Agency. As our service shows you information from all three Credit Reference Agencies, we can raise disputes with each one.
- We’ll be back in touch once we receive a response from the relevant Credit Reference Agency. They have a statutory 28-day period to provide a response, but we will let you know as soon as we have an outcome.
You can then use checkmyfile to check that the change has been made at all relevant Credit Reference Agencies by refreshing your Multi Agency Credit Report.