Ms Catherine Collins:

In Ireland we have the Irish Credit Bureau. The United Kingdom has a different procedure and does much more credit scoring and there are companies that provide credit scores and train others how to achieve a better credit score. One will hear advertising campaigns on the radio and see campaigns on the television for that service.

The Credit Bureau comprises members who come together and put the information on lenders or regulated entities up and they can run their reports on what has been happening. As I understand it, the credit register will be a slightly bigger animal as it will also include information on credit union lending.

The banks are telling us is that they will take a certain amount of that into account. When the bureau gets a report from that, it gives the lending history of the customer in the past five years, stating whether the customer is in arrears, has defaulted, reached a settlement, and whether the legals were involved. An individual can sign on and download his or her own credit report, which I think costs €6. There is a very low awareness of this service and people do not realise that this may be the sticking point, when they are looking for credit.

The credit register is coming down the track and it will provide a service for individuals in late 2016-17, but it will be late 2017 to early 2018 before incorporated entities are included. There will be one free report every year which will be a big plus, because people will be able to see that report without even having to pay a small fee for it. I hope some awareness raising will happen at that time and people will know a little bit more about it.

Credit scoring is all about trying to assess the risk of the loan going into default. Information such as the number of credit applications that have been made will have an impact. A person making a significant number of credit applications apparently gives that person a bad credit score. In the United Kingdom it depends on a person's postal code and if one has the correct postal code, one has a much better credit score and if one has the wrong postal code one has a very poor credit score. I am not sure how that will work in this country. We are a much smaller country and we do not have the same scale. I am not sure statistically how that would work if one tried to replicate that model here. What the banks in Ireland tend to do is to look at the actual performance, how one has performed in terms of repayments of the lending and so on, rather than actual scores..