Business Credit Bureaus
corporate credit officesCR Services, headquartered in Nigeria, CRC Credit Bureau, which was established as a joint venture between Nigerian companies and the US company Dun and Bradstreet, and Xpert Decision Systems (XDS) Credit Bureau of South Africa. These three offices have consistently expanded their reach from nearly 80,000 clients in December 2010 to over 29 million by the end of 2015.
Today, the CBN requires banking and other CBN entities to review the data bases of at least two of the three supervisory authorities before making a credit assessment. As each office establishes and sustains its own separate data base and information exchange arrangements, the information stored may differ between offices.
In addition to the overall objective of assessing credibility, the creation of credit surveillance was driven by the wish to reduce system malpractice. As credit bureaus emerge, there will be more trust and visibility in the credit system," said Olanrewaju Agbede, XDS Credit's OBG Director of MRO. "BVN has also made it simpler to associate a credit rating with a name.
" BVN, the unambiguous numerical identification introduced in 2015, has made it easy for credit bureaus to connect a customer's credit histories across different bank and account types. Credit databanks and the BVN are reducing the system's risk of frauds by taking into account issues beyond mere bio-writing.
With a view to further broadening cover and improving integrated governance, the inclusion of new information resources in credit reporting has been encouraged. CBN supervised banking entities are obliged to use credit surveillance, but other FIs such as developers financing entities and mortgage lending entities are not.
The conviction of these companies to make use of credit surveillance service could help to significantly broaden the overall population. CBN seemed to have a wide dataset in Mind when it prepared its 2008 Office Operations Manual, which allowed the gathering of information from "other companies that have information and information that serve the business purpose".
The credit bureaus have since taken full use of the open character of the text of the law and retained a large margin of manoeuvre in the definition of what is an acceptable well. In view of the volume of information gathered, credit bureaux are now looking for ways to use this information for purposes other than credit-making.
Among the business enhancements considered by commentators are the selling of information to third party providers, such as credit cards companies, the inclusion of information in venture price schemes and the emergence of concise creditworthiness, a characteristic commonly used in many jurisdictions but not yet available in Nigeria.