The full launch of the Philippines’ centralised credit information system was pushed to December of this year, from its initial third quarter schedule.
According to a recent report, the system is already somewhat live since submitting entities or financial institutions can access their data for monitoring purposes.
However, the credit reports are not yet being provided to the borrowers.
The scheduled launch was put back by the state-run Credit Information Corporation (CIC) to give access to select individual borrowers.
Hopefully, by the beginning of December, credit reports can be given to the data subjects in line with the ease of doing business.
Individual borrowers who wish to request for credit information are expected to be allowed physical access to data by then.
Although in order to do that, they should first book an appointment before the corporation will give out their requested credit reports.
As the system is still being slowly opened to the public, only online registration is being allowed. User need to register first before they can come to the office to claim their credit reports.
Soon enough, the credit registry will have an online platform where individuals can request for credit data. However, there is still no specific timeline for this facility.
Currently, the corporation is securing the system first. They are avoiding making these data available online as there is a risk of the data being subjected to possible hacking and infringement.
But, they have reassured that the plan is to really course it through the credit bureaus.
There are four official credit bureaus, as of current. The special accessing entities are firms from the Philippines, South Africa, Italy and the United States, namely CIBI Information, Inc., Compuscan, CRIF S.p.A, and TransUnion Information Solutions, Inc., respectively.
The corporation is still in the process of collecting data from the lending institutions and populating the database before its launch.
They have already collected 5.867 million unique data from financial institutions, as of 22 October 2018.
These financial institutions include banks, cooperatives, credit card firms, insurers, and government-owned and -controlled firms, among others.
The CIC has been having talks with 1,637 institutions on the proper process of filing credit data. Of which, 310 are now regularly submitting and updating loan information.
The Credit Information Corporation is a government-owned and controlled corporation.
It is the country’s one and only public credit registry created to be the leading provider of independent, reliable and accurate credit information.