What Are The Four Major Credit Bureaus – Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion are the top three consumer credit bureaus. They collect and store information about you that they use to generate your credit report and that form the basis of your credit score.
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What Are The Four Major Credit Bureaus
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A credit bureau is a company that collects and stores various information about you and your financial accounts and history. It uses this information to create your credit report, which in turn forms the basis of your credit score.
The three major credit bureaus are often grouped together. But individual companies competing for lenders’ business can use credit reports and scores from these agencies to help make credit decisions. And they’re not the only three agencies out there.
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Read on to learn more about the information the credit bureaus collect, how the credit bureaus get the information they use to generate your report and score, and how to contact them if you think something isn’t right.
Think of your credit report as a snapshot of your credit history. Each of the various credit bureaus collects a number of important pieces of information to compile your credit report.
Your credit report also contains personal information such as your name, address, social security number, and date of birth.
Information from your credit report is used to calculate your credit score. Credit scoring models can calculate the same information on the same credit report differently. But the major scoring models, FICO and VantageScore, look at five key areas of information to determine your score: payment history, credit utilization, credit history, credit mix and recent credit.
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Your credit report can be used by lenders, such as credit card issuers, when considering whether to open a line of credit for you. Credit bureaus can use information from your report to calculate your credit score.
Information Reported to Credit Bureaus — Creditors, such as banks and credit card companies, may report information about their accounts and customers to credit bureaus. In this sense, lenders are known as “data service providers”.
Information Collected or Purchased by Bureaus – For some types of information, credit bureaus purchase data. For example, a consumer credit bureau may purchase public record information from another credit bureau, LexisNexis, and use that information to compile a credit report. Examples of information that credit bureaus may purchase include tax liens or government bankruptcy records.
Information shared between bureaus – Even though they are competitors, credit bureaus sometimes need to share information with each other. For example, when you send an initial fraud report to one agency, you need to pass it on to the other two.
Major Business Credit Agencies
When you check your credit, you may notice that your credit score can vary from agency to agency. One reason for this variation may be the potential differences in the data that make up each report. Lenders don’t
Report to the credit bureaus. And while many lenders will choose to report, some will only send your account information to one or two of the major bureaus instead of all three, and record different information from bureau to bureau.
Because credit scores come from detailed information on a single credit report, your credit score can vary greatly depending on which agency report you use as your data source.
You may notice that your FICO credit score differs from your VantageScore credit score, even if you use the same agency report. That’s because they’re two independent scoring models that take slightly different approaches to evaluating your credit report to come up with your score.
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It’s normal to look at credit scores from different agencies, but we recommend checking your credit report regularly for errors.
As a consumer, you can get your free credit report once a year at dailycreditreport.com. You can also sign up for Credit Karma for free to view your Equifax and TransUnion credit reports and your VantageScore 3.0 credit score.
You also have the right to dispute inaccurate information in your report and the information providers. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the consumer reporting company and the company that reports the information to the credit bureaus must conduct a free audit to verify the information and correct any errors found.
You can dispute the information by phone using the number on your credit report or by looking up the most recent number on the credit bureau’s website. However, you may prefer postal or electronic disputes as you will have a paper trail.
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To file a dispute with another credit bureau, visit its website or find contact information in the CFPB directory. You may need to submit your dispute by mail or telephone.
Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion may be the big three, but there are actually a lot of consumer credit bureaus. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has compiled a list of dozens of consumer credit bureaus, organized by the type of information they provide.
Find out from the CFPB list each credit bureau’s website, phone number, address, a brief description of what they do, and whether they provide free reports to consumers. Many people do this, but sometimes you have to call or email your request.
The three major credit bureaus—Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion—pull from a variety of sources to compile your credit report. Credit scoring models like FICO and VantageScore use these reports to calculate your credit score. Your credit score may vary from credit bureau to credit bureau, but this is normal.
Free Credit Report Dispute Letter Template
Check your credit report regularly. As a Credit Karma member, you can freely access your Equifax and TransUnion credit reports and VantageScore 3.0 credit scores at any time, or request a copy of your credit report once a year at dailycreditreport.com.
If you find an error, contact the credit bureau whose report contains incorrect information and file a dispute. By law, credit bureaus must conduct inspections and correct any errors they find.
About the Author: Louis DeNicola is a personal finance writer who has written for American Express, Discover and Nova Credit. In addition to being a contributing writer for Credit Karma, you can find his work on Business Insider, Cheapi… Read More How much time will it take you to freeze your credit files with one of the major credit bureaus?
One day late last week I was online for about 75 minutes when I froze a family member’s TransUnion credit file. Thankfully, the Indians game was meant to be a distraction, so it didn’t feel like a waste of time. I was ready to pull my hair out. At one point, I thought TransUnion’s website was broken because it was down for so long. But I persevered and did it.
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It took me 3 minutes to freeze another family member’s file through TransUnion, and I loved it. This time on the phone. Three incredibly quick minutes.
Wow. After doing real freezes for real people with the four major credit bureaus, I recommend people freeze their files over the phone rather than online. To reiterate: Freezing your files online has been easier these days since the news of the Equifax breach three weeks ago, but it still takes longer to do online, and there are many online landmines to avoid. Unsolicited subscription service, long lead times, unsolicited sales pitches, etc.
I’m usually an online kind of girl. I’m far from a millennial, but I’m very comfortable in the tech world of shopping, banking, and communications.
But forget about online if the loan stops. It’s a horror show. On the other hand, making phone calls is easy if you pay close attention to the minutes it takes to complete each call.
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If you want to force yourself, freeze with Innovis first. Even so