A credit report is a combined summary of all your financial background. It gives an overview of your credit score, profile, and rating. It is often used by lenders, such as home-loan and personal loan companies, to make accurate decisions on whether they should lend to you or not.
It includes:

• Lines of credit held in your name.
• Your payment history, including missed and late payments.
• Outstanding balances on your accounts.
• Credit searches done on your profile.
• Publicly available information which may affect your creditworthiness. (example: court bankruptcies, judgements).
• Your address links and financial connections e.g. joint accounts.

Credit management is the way in which you manage and control the money that you borrow from creditors - for example, store cards, banks, hire purchases and cell phone contracts. This information is recorded by credit reference agencies and makes up your credit profile. By monitoring your credit profile you can take action to improve it or correct any inaccurate information.

Your credit profile is an important tool that lenders use when deciding whether they will offer you credit. It can also affect the terms of credit they will offer, or the rate of interest they will charge.

By managing your credit profile effectively you can ensure that your image and profile is kept to a high level of quality and is viewed favorably by lenders or other organisations when they decide whether to lend to you. Furthermore, managing your credit properly will also enable you to immediately notice any inaccuracies or attempted fraudulent activity on your profile, allowing you to take swift action to fix it.

The credit report and score we provide to you is created by Kudough Credit Solutions (Pty) Ltd, an authorised agent of TransUnion, Experian, and XDS Credit Reference Agencies. It contains a summary of your financial background and status.

This allows you to see what might be impacting on your credit worthiness and allows you to check that everything recorded about you is correct. Incorrect information could impact your ability to get credit. Having a poor credit profile and score can result in you being declined for a loan, or being charged a higher level of interest.

Provided that the Credit Reference Agency has been able to verify your details, you can expect to view your credit report within 5-10 mins after making a payment.

No. You are able to buy a once-off report from us without having to sign up to a rolling monthly debit order. You can either buy a single once-off report including a report from 3 different credit bureaus, or you can buy access to allow you to get an unlimited number of reports for a 12 month period. For this option, you can either pay by monthly debit order, or a once off annual amount. As long as the Credit Reference Agencies are able to confirm your ID number and details, you will be able to access your credit report online and will be able to check it as often as you want, and at any time.

No, this is because the information contained in a credit profile is personal to only you. If you have friends or family members who would require access to their credit report or need help to manage their credit profile, they can apply separately with MyCreditMonitor too.

If you apply to borrow money or set up a contract, for example for a personal loan, a home-loan, a credit card, or a cell phone contract, the lender or credit provider is likely to access your credit profile. Other companies with a valid reason may also do so. With the MyCreditMonitor service, you may receive an alert to let you know when a company has viewed your credit profile.

Your credit score is a number from 0 to 999 and is calculated by using all the details in your credit profile. You will find your credit score on your credit report. Having a higher score will make it easier for you to borrow money, or buy goods on credit. Having a higher score also means you're more likely to be able to obtain better deals with lower rates of interest.

Each lender will calculate their own score for you and they may take into account other information such as information their organisation already holds about you, or your employment circumstances. Your score can change depending on the creditor you want to borrow money from.

Your score is a reflection of how you manage your accounts as well as your risk profile. It might be due to the fact that you haven't used any credit for a while, so there will not be any information to show that you have a good history of paying off credit. This is one of the main factors that lenders use to calculate your credit score.

Assets, such as your savings, do not have an impact on your credit score. In actual fact, the Data Protection Act means that a Credit Reference Agency is not allowed to hold this data.

Many reasons could influence your credit score and reduce it lower than you thought it would be. These reasons could be:

• A credit history of less than 6 years, which is the period used to calculate your total credit score. (A shorter credit history means that the lender has less information to base their score on).
• Missed or late payments over the last 6 years.
• Holding very few credit accounts means there will be less credit history available on you.
• Court Judgements or record of insolvency.
• Having a lot of un-used credit available could lead to a large balance of debt if you decided to use it all at once.
• Balances on your accounts that are very close to the credit limit indicate that you rely on credit to get through each month.

It could be for many reasons. Every lender is different in the way in which they assess your credit risk. The best thing to do is to contact the lender directly and ask them to explain why they declined you.

Of course. As a member of MyCreditMonitor, you have access to a dispute service which will provide help to correct anything you think could be wrong on your credit profile. We are not able to make the changes ourselves, because your credit report is made up from information that TransUnion, Experian, and XDS (the Credit Reference Agencies) hold about you, however, we can help you through the procedures you might need to take to fix your ratings. If you find something that's wrong on your credit report, contact us.

Yes it will, if it was within the last six years. This is due to the fact that your credit profile includes six years’ worth of payment history. Late payments will cause a negative impact on your credit score.

Lenders usually look at the last six years of your credit history.

There are many things which you can do to help improve your credit score, including:

• Regularly checking your credit report to confirm that all the details are correct.
• Making sure that you make payments on any outstanding credit accounts on the due date. (Should you have difficulty in making your payments, you should contact your credit provider to try agree a payment plan, or to reduce your regular payments to an amount that you can afford to pay).
• Consider setting up regular automated payments rather than doing manual payments.
• If you have too many old, un-used credit accounts, consider closing them.
• If you are almost reaching your credit limit on one or more accounts, try and reduce your balance.

No, checking your own credit report does not have a negative impact on your credit score.

Simply call our call centre on 0861 127 334 and request to cancel your subscription. This is immediate, there will be no further charges payable by you, and access to your report will stop.