How to build a better credit score

A good credit score is a gateway to getting accepted for credit. Plus, the higher your credit score, the better your chances of securing cheaper rates and higher limits. Here are a few things you can do to improve your credit rating.

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This is an interesting post, I use ClearScore to check my credit rating and noticed that my Monzo account doesn’t show in the report whereas accounts from other banks do, such as Lloyds.

Is this intentional, and will this affect my credit rating?

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Monzo only report to Transunion(callcredit) so it will show on your Noddle report

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From the blog post:

Luckily, there are a few ways to build a credit history. For example, you could open a bank account

Is an account without overdraft likely to improve your credit history? What if you have an overdraft but don’t use it at all, is it going to improve your credit history?

Relevant to my interests… thanks ! :slight_smile:

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Closed my old bank account as I only used Monzo and my credit score went down due to the Monzo current account being too recently opened :slightly_frowning_face:

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It will go back up soon over time. It won’t have any long term impact

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It’s to be expected but it’ll pick back up as your credit file settles. Remember your credit score is just an arbitrary number and doesn’t mean anything. Every lender/credit file checker score according to their criteria and risk profiling

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I looked into this a bit.

Here’s the full thread if you want to read the whole discussion.

I still think they should report to other agencies but it seems I’m in the minority.

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Has anyone considered or tried Loqbox to simultaneously save and build credit history?

Now now Monzo, I may usually love you but talking about building a better credit score really isnt an area you should be commenting on :triumph:

As a bank that appeals heavily to the younger generation, the ones who most need to build a credit score for when the big purchases of cars and homes come up, is it not worth highlighting that you only share data with the smallest of the three big credit rating agencies?

Most companies, especially banks tend to only use the big two (Experian & Equifax) both of which you are providing no data to therefore Monzo is making it harder than ever to build a good credit score…

Let’s focus on maybe catching up on that?

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If that’s the case, your banking set-up should involve other providers as well. On top of that, I am super interested in getting the answer to the question I asked before:

I hope @bea who wrote the blog post or anyone in the knowledge can shed light on this topic. :smile:

It’s important to start taking TransUnion (formally CallCredit) seriously now. They are the second largest and fastest growing credit reference agency in the UK. More and more financial institutions use them over the other two now

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Hey there,

I’m the Product Manager working on our lending features. I’ll try answer a few questions!

We report to Callcredit (now Transunion) so it won’t show up on ClearScore yet. As far as I’m aware the Credit Reference Agencies don’t share information with each other. This means it won’t affect your ClearScore credit rating.

This can happen when you take out a new current account, or have multiple credit ‘events’ around the same time (these ‘credit events’ could be signing up for a current account, taking out credit, getting a phone contract). It shouldn’t have a long term impact and the score will go up fairly quickly.

We’d like to start doing this, but don’t yet have a timeline.

This is true! They’re not far behind Equifax in terms of coverage. Reference here: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/credit-cards/credit-reference/

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Cheers,
Rich

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Can you answer this?

Thanks! :blush:

Hey @Caanan it can get a little complex but I find people can answer most of their credit scoring questions if they think of it like this;

Lenders and CRAs are generally measuring…

  1. Longevity of credit use
  2. How responsibly that credit is managed
  3. How indebted you are
  4. That you are who you say you are

So, the longer you have responsibly managed credit and as long as you don’t get over indebted, the better that is for your credit score.

Opening a bank account provides assurance you are who you say you are. If you have an overdraft you don’t use, it could indicate you don’t have an over-reliance on credit.

Sometimes upon opening an account there can be short periods where your score drops slightly. If you open loads at the same time then it will very likely be affected, particularly if you apply for overdrafts on all of them. Loads of applications for credit or new accounts can indicate financial difficulties or it even that your identity has been stolen and a fraudster is applying for lots of new accounts.

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Thanks a lot @StuartM. Appreciate your response and it makes things clearer for me! :yum:

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Great summary thanks @StuartM !

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How can I get a better score plez? I want them extra 19 points init :upside_down_face:

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What confuses me is the huge difference between credit agencies (at least in my case). According to Experian my score is 999/999, while according to noddle it’s 611/710 (below the UK average 615). My understanding is that Monzo only uses the latter, thus will not approve an overdraft. It’s not that necessary for me but (1) it gives me some peace of mind (the main reason I haven’t gone full monzo yet) (2) it’s disheartening to be denied one.

How can there be such a discrepancy between agencies? Given that Noddle offers a paid service to help you improve your credit score, am I being paranoid in wondering whether a low score serves as way to lure customers to that service?