Has your loan application got rejected unexpectedly? Chances are your credit score played the spoiler. A number of times, such problems occur because of the inability of a customer to take care of his/her credit score.

A credit score takes a 'snapshot' of a consumer’s credit report and through advanced analytics turns the information into a three-digit number representing the amount of risk a consumer brings to a particular transaction. The possible score range is between 300-900.

The higher the score, the lesser the risk of a consumer going 91+ days overdue in the next year. Banks and financial institutions usually reply on this score to judge the creditworthiness of a customer.

Cibil is the agency that maintains this score in India.The score is utilised by banks at each point in the credit lifecycle – issuing the loan, account management and collections – and will provide additional insights for financial services companies to consider.

The agency says the CIBIL TransUnion scoring model uses various attributes based on credit behavior information for determining the credit score. And while many of them are proprietary in nature, the majority of the score is made up of the elements like credit Utilisation (how much credit is a consumer using), defaulting (how many accounts are past due – by how many days and by how much), number of inquiries (has this consumer applied for additional credit lines), and trade attributes (how old are this consumer’s lines of credit? What type of credit does he have? Does the consumer have a good mix of credit or is it all credit cards?)

So, if you are trapped in such a lybrinth, what do you do? Cibil says it has operationalised an interim solution to provide individuals access to their credit information report. Under this mechanism, Cibil allows individuals direct access to their credit reports. The consumer relations system has features that allow consumers to access their report on-line and banks to respond to errors via an on-line maintenance tool.

Customers can also obtain a credit information report (CIR) directly from Cibil. CIR is a factual record of the individual’s credit payment history compiled from information received from credit grantors.

The purpose is to help credit grantors make informed lending decisions - quickly and objectively, and enable faster processing of one’s credit applications to help provide speedier access to credit at better terms.