Hacker News Reader

Comment by beefield | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, I am not that confident about that. I live in Europe, and to my knowledge we do not have that kind of credit score companies (there are databases about people who have defaulted their debts, though), and to my knowledge it is banks themselves that do the credit evaluation.[1] And credit for middle class is to my standards pretty cheap enough here as well.

[1] More than happy to be corrected here with sources, I just have not ever heard about Equifax-like company in Europe

View on HN

Of course they do (exist in Europe).

Most companies giving you a credit of some sort (banks, phone contracts, ...) are required to do vetting of you.

To help them do that, they use credit rating bureaus.

In Europe, you as a private person just don't know it and don't have access to your own rating. But you are likely to be rated anyways..

Here is one danish example (at least three exists)

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=da&tl=en&u=https%3...

> In Europe, you as a private person just don't know it and don't have access to your own rating. But you are likely to be rated anyways..

In the E.U., there are no private organisations who can process your personal data without making it available to you on request.

In Ireland, there's a state-run Central Credit Register, to which lenders must submit any consumer credit agreement above €200, and which they must check by law before issuing credit. Anyone can apply online to get their credit history from the CCR, and make submissions to correct inaccuracies.

There's also the Irish Credit Bureau, a private organisation with a similar purpose. They are also required to reveal data held about you on request, and correct inaccurate data held.

In the US you can request your credit score once per year from each credit rating angecy at no cost.

The thing you can request once per year from annualcreditreport is your credit report, which doesn't include your score. Your score is accessible for free from websites like creditkarma or through most credit card online accounts, usually once a month although I have seen ones which update twice a month.

In Italy there is a Centrale Rischi, but is a government/public service (run by the Bank of Italy):

https://www.bancaditalia.it/statistiche/raccolta-dati/centra...

and I believe that in the end (now it is partial/experimental/in the works AFAICU) there will be an European Registry at the BCE (Anacredit):

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/money_credit_banking/anacred...

Though there is no "public" access to the data in the Centrale Rischi, you can have it going in person to the Bank of Italy, the issue is that - if you find an error/mistake - it must be corrected by the bank/agency/whatever that made the erroneous entry, and this can sometimes be a nightmare, not so much with banks, but with smallish financial service agancies (that might have - in the meantime - changed property or going in default, etc.).

AFAIK the KreditRegisteret you linked to is required because Denmark, not part of Euro, does not have access to AnaCredit. So it's more of a tool for financial stability, and not private loan estimates. What is EU's AnaCredit?

> AnaCredit is a dataset with detailed information on individual bank loans in the euro area. The name stands for “analytical credit datasets”. The ECB launched the project in 2011 – together with the euro area and some non-euro area national central banks. It uses data and national credit registers to achieve a harmonised database that supports several central banking functions, such as decision-making in monetary policy and macroprudential supervision.

In Denmark I'm mostly aware of RKI, which seems to be owned by Experian now. If you fail to pay your loans, you end up on that bad payer list. Otherwise getting a loan is a private matter between you and your bank unless you want to use a third party lender

I'd like to get some further sources. Below is what Wikipedia has to say about Danish credit scoring[1] (emphasis mine) I know there are databases the store your information if you have defaulted your loans, but that is (to me) very different thing to actual credit scoring, which obviously any entity in credit business is and should be doing. I would be very keen to know (some of) the companies that sell actual credit scores of individual people in (mainland) Europe, and possibly shoot a GDPR request at them.

The Wikipedia snippet:

The credit scoring is widely used in Denmark by the banks and a number of private companies within telco and others. The credit scoring is split in two:

    Private: The probability of defaulting
    Businesses: The probability of bankruptcy

For privates, the credit scoring is always made by the creditor. For businesses it is either made by the creditor or by a third party.

There are a few companies who have specialized in developing credit scorecards in Denmark:

    Experian (generic rating for business)
    Bisnode (generic rating for business)

The credit scorecards in Denmark are mainly based on information provided by the applicant and publicly available data. It is very restricted by legislation compared to its neighbouring countries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_score#Denmark

Banks in Norway use Experian to check your risk. Anytime you apply for a loan you'll get a letter in the mail from Experian a few days later letting you know who made the request and what their response was.

Does Experian response with an actual credit score as opposed to information whether you have defaulted some of your loans recently or not?

The UK is in Europe (for now) and has Equifax and the other credit reference agencies.

The UK imports all the shitty things from the US, instead of looking at what the european are doing: - No national ID, so identity theft is easier - For a long time, no pin code on credit card, so that theft is easier Basically they keep the stuff which trick the consumer, whereas in Europe they make law to protect consumer.

I really hope they leave the EU and stop bothering us with their shitty ideas, credit reference beeing one

>No national ID, so identity theft is easier

We don't want national identity cards; the Blair government tried to introduce them in 2006 and failed due to massive public opposition. We think it's a bit weird that other EU nationals are so tolerant of the government having a massive centralised database tied to a single token.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006

>For a long time, no pin code on credit card, so that theft is easier

Most of our debit card market is Visa/Mastercard, so we switched to Chip and PIN in 2006 - the same time as most international markets. Some European markets had their own local debit card schemes but these schemes were far from perfect.

>Basically they keep the stuff which trick the consumer, whereas in Europe they make law to protect consumer.

Last time I checked, we were still in the EU and still subject to EU law. We implemented the GDPR (and our regulator is one of the most proactive in actually enforcing it), we implemented the Consumer Rights Directive and we were well ahead of the curve in many areas, particularly distance selling and consumer finance.

You have drivers licenses and bank cards and passports already. Having a national ID just makes a bunch of stuff easier and identity theft harder.

A national ID card is a single point of failure. If I need to verify my ID for something important, I'll usually be asked for two forms of ID documents which may be subject to additional verification.

How do any of your examples 'trick' the consumer?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com