Free Credit Report: Is It Really Free?

Nowadays, in and around the financial environment, every lender looks at your credit score before considering your borrower profile. On the basis of credit history, it’s much easier to assess the potential risk of losses/default. This is exactly why borrowers are looking forward to finding out their credit score & for free. However, it’s important to stay cautious & keep a few pointers in mind.

Avoid being trapped

In the past few years, too many websites claim to supply free credit scores to its customers, however, they are bluntly lying. So, they basically try to bluff prospects to increase their website traffic & a fee.

When users sign up, they’re gotten registered, tactfully, in one or the other credit monitoring service that charges a consolidated fee. It requires the sites to provide a public notification about the hidden charges if any applicable.

Several credit tracking companies have minted money around these notifications. Paisabazaar was the first credit aggregator in India which started providing free credit scores to the users. Consumers can also request for their score & receive a trial subscription for credit tracking. And if you change your mind early, cancel it within the stipulated days.

Where It’s Truly Free?

It’s possible to find websites that freely use the notion, ‘free credit score’ on their website. This way CIBIL & Equifax are doing a good job.

The dubious websites do not make money directly from consumers. They either collect advertising revenue or charge their lending partners a fee when they get a new customer onboarding.

Although credit companies do not totally rely on the numerical rating to make their lending decisions however, it surely comes handy. While a few will depend on your credit information & report & others will calculate your mathematical score to help conclude better. So we aren’t saying credit scores are not valuable, we only mean to say that there are many other factors that need attention. With the changing digital space, customers are always looking for free, one-click services & therefore card issuers are now offering scores for free as a way to entice new customers.

These companies now bring to you the opportunity to read your credit report without going deep into your score, you can do that once a year, free of cost. And we will also be able to observe that on the government-sanctioned websites you can request reports from any 3 bureaus: Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. Banks/ financial institutions make use of 1 or many or reports to take that one lending decision. It’s always a good idea to ensure all 3 contain accurate information about your past financial history.

Though, good websites attempt to increase transparency and offer “free” credit scores after beating the stringent rules. So, remember if a website asks for your credit card details before providing a concrete score. Obviously, there are resources to view this data for free, that’s probably where you should start your search from.