CR Services, the nation’s foremost credit bureau has introduced Portfolio Monitoring, a special product which would help banks to boost lending.

Managing Director/Chief Executive of the company, Mr. Taiwo Ayedun disclosed this at a media briefing on Friday in Lagos.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) mandates banks to subscribe to at least two of the four licensed credit bureaus in the country. Banks are also mandated to use credit reports from credit bureaus before granting credit to any customer.

Ayedun said the company has achieved 100 per cent coverage of the banking industry as all the 24 banks now subscribe to its credit bureau services. He said there have been increased use of credit reports by banks in recent times. He said in the first half of this year, CR Services recorded 837 per cent growth in request for credit information by banks adding that 85 per cent of request for credit information on its platform was successful. He said this means 85 per cent of the time, that the banks find the credit information of the borrower they were looking for.

He said CR Services has deployed portfolio monitoring tool in order to enhance the benefit of its services to banks. This, he said, is a revolutionary tool which can revolutionise banks’ lending in the country, adding that CR Services is the first to offer it in Nigeria.

He said portfolio monitoring report provides banks and other subcribers to its services information on how people that borrow from them are perfoming in the loan performance with other banks in the industry.

This, he said would help them to know how the business they lent to is doing with them relative to other banks, and hence be able to market the customers for more loan business. He said it also helps them to know the possibility of the borrower defaulting on its loan with bank, based on its loan performance with other banks made available through the portfolio monitoring reports. He said the report will also help borrowers to get compettitive loan offers, as banks upon knowing that a borrower is perfoming in terms of loan repayment, would want to extend credit to the customer hence they would offer competitive offers.

He said with the deployment of the portfolio monitoring services, the company would soon launch a website that would enable individual borrowers to view their credit report. He said this is in line with CBN guidelines which say that an individual borrower is entitled to at least one free credit report every year.

He said that in addition to these, the company in the next 18 months would begin to introduce ‘Credit Scores’ for individual borrowers, adding that the product has been approved by CBN.

He explained that the Credit Score is just another interpretation of the data that credit bureaus get from the market.

“The CBN regulates our industry, so every product we sell, the CBN must know about it. Right now, the CBN is aware that we are selling credit reports, they are aware that we are selling portfolio monitoring reports and we have already told them that we want to sell credit scores as well. Credit Scores are traditional credit bureau products,” he said.

A credit score is a numerical expression based on a statistical analysis of a person’s credit files, to represent the creditworthiness of that person. It is primarily based on credit report information typically sourced from credit bureaus.

“The credit scores usually come after the credit bureau has amassed a lot of information because to have an accurate credit score, you need a rich historical information because credit score is based on making inference from a lot of data and saying that based on all these data we have about people’s repayment ability, we can now start giving them score. So without those data, you cannot even score. The credit score will be sold to the banks and you can also buy your credit score if you want.”