Credit Information Corporation (CIC) President and CEO Jaime P. Garchitorena highlighted the technology-approached of giving and receiving credit through CIC's Credit Information System (CIS) during the CIC's technical compliance workshop held at the I’M Hotel in Makati City last August 30, 2017.
"Getting Ready for Credit"
President Garchitorena lays emphasis on having a "getting ready for credit" mindset in the technical workshop attended by cooperatives and rural banks. He added that if lenders are to lend more, they should safely lend more while borrowers improve their access to credit.
Availability of Credit Reports
By 2018, the CIC targets to make the credits reports readily available to the public. President Garchitorena urged participants to prepare for the full launch of the system by learning how to use it. The use of credit scores by accessing the CIC database is seen to be one of the most significant tools to hit the Philippine financial market in the coming years.
Utilizing Credit Reports
As a business tool, these credit reports can be used to identify borrower's credit history, minimizing the need for potentially expensive and time-consuming process of traditional credit investigation on a borrower's transaction history.
CIC’s credit reports are updated on a regular basis and are generally no more than thirty days old. It contains positive and negative transactional history, thus providing lenders with a fair, reliable and objective tool to assess the payment behavior of borrowers.
The Obligation of Lenders and Borrowers
The system should be able to help lenders to improve their credit offerings to creditworthy borrowers. Even for those borrowers to be determined as risky, the transparency offered by credit reports and credit scores will give banks the opportunity to lend; but in order to manage the risk and protect their stakeholders, may require that the loans be secured by further by requiring a co-borrower or collateral.
As the data-driven lending environment matures, credit scores can serve as reputational collateral taking the place of traditional asset-based collaterals when applicable. Thus, it's the obligation of borrowers to commit to timely repayments in order to build their creditworthiness and create opportunities for them to avail of bigger loan amounts at lower interest rates and longer credit terms.
Beginning 2018, interested parties can avail the CIC’s credit reports from any of CIC’s four accredited credit bureaus or Special Accessing Entities (SAEs) namely: CIBI Information Corporation (CIBI), Compuscan Philippines Inc. (Compuscan), CRIF Philippines (CRIF), and TransUnion Information Solutions Philippines (TransUnion).