Date:09/10/2004 URL: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2004/10/09/stories/2004100901890600.htm

Back CIBIL has database on 8 m borrowers

N.S. Vageesh

Chennai , Oct. 8

CREDIT Information Bureau (India) Ltd (CIBIL) now has a database of 8 million records of the credit history of individual consumers taken from various banks, financial institutions and non-banking finance companies.

The database is expected to touch 10 million records by November.

Financial institutions, housing finance companies, and banks, which subscribe to the service, can query CIBIL about the credit history of these borrowers on the payment of a nominal fee. This fee, originally fixed at Rs 50 per consumer query (card rate) would be brought down depending on usage and sharing of data.

CIBIL has decided to charge Rs 10 per query, up to December. The credit report from CIBIL would indicate, how much the individual has borrowed and what his/her repayment history has been. This is expected to mitigate credit risks, enable speedier and more objective credit decisions by banks.

Mr Satish Mehta, Managing Director, said that 17 banks have shared their full data with CIBIL. Data sharing is on the basis of reciprocity whereby members must contribute entire data on all borrowers.

"About 80 banks and financial institutions have begun to part with more information and it is presently being validated and testing process was on," Mr Mehta said.

On sharing of commercial credit information, i.e., information about companies, partnerships and business enterprises, Mr Mehta said that CIBIL's business would begin only after the database reached a "critical mass".

He said that it was important that the numbers of banks offering this information had to increase along with the value. He was confident that this business would begin by the first quarter of the next fiscal year.

How would CIBIL handle a query about an individual consumer, given the number of people with similar names/initials as well as the different ways of spelling it and different formats of name usage?

Mr Mehta said: "CIBIL uses a sequence of search engines which will appraise the different fields such as name, address, date of birth, passport number, permanent account number and telephone number. Our experience in being able to narrow down the search for a particular record has been quite satisfactory."

Mr Mehta said that all lenders were now providing the required information that was collected as part of the "Know your Customer" (KYC) guidelines of the Reserve Bank of India.