I moved from Ireland to UK in May of this year and opened a Monzo account. This is currently my only UK bank account. I’ve been paid my salary in here twice so far, and I have several bills coming from this and a joint account I have with my girlfriend.
The annoying thing is that there is no trace of me on any credit score checkers. I can’t verify my identity on the GOV UK website either because they can’t find anything on me.
My question is; should I be building up a credit score/presence using Monzo? Or do you think that will happen if I create a bank account with one of the major branches instead? Or does it just take several months before my credit score will become available.
Monzo report to Transunion so whoever you’re checking your credit report with needs to be getting their data from there.
Your score won’t improve just because you’ve opened a bank account - you need to have had an account for a decent amount of time. There are many other things that you need to do such as being on the electoral role, living in the same address for 5+ years and so on.
A credit card is also a good way to improve your score too - just make sure you pay it off in full each month to avoid charges.
Then there is the whole argument of how much value there is in a credit score, but each person sees this differently
tl;dr: Don’t just rely on Monzo to build your score, there’s much more to it than that
You could try searching ‘credit building’ credit cards … as mentioned above, pay it off each month as a high % balance will count against you and pay on time.
This is probably of good use as it sections the different areas where you can individually (or some/all in parallel) build & increase your credit score;
Obviously, the details in Step 1 don’t apply because you’re already with
If you haven’t already, register to vote - you need to be on the electoral register to pass any credit check, it will presumably help identify you with .gov.uk sites as well.
As far as I know Monzo will only report an identity check (which leaves on a soft-footprint on your credit report) when you sign up. If you are approved for / start using an overdraft they will have to report this borrowing.
Monzo only use Transunion as a previous poster said - however most large lenders prefer Equifax or Experian as their credit reference agencies. Transunion by comparison is a lot smaller and so many ID checking / credit checking applications may fail because of this.
If you have a well rounded report covering all the other equally important factors you’ll find that it doesn’t matter much.
I can be testament to this after closing all my other accounts to be full Monzo for a few years ago now. I’ve since had a couple of loans, several credit cards and I got a mortgage recently too with zero issues
But someone new to the UK with only a Monzo account and no internal credit assessments available from major providers you’ll likely find this difficult especially when your bank doesn’t report to the major providers that other providers check.
You’ll have more success with a bank who reports to major agencies to get yourself off the ground with a credit agency.
Yeah I suppose. I get what you’re saying but there is only so much you can do at once.
Personally I’d go down the credit card route but if you’re opening another bank account as well you’re going to take another hit that will impact your score.
This is very true and something I think is quite important.
You’d be best off going on a card matcher and seeing what your acceptance rate is. If you go on Credit Karma (where your Monzo credit is reported to) and see what their card acceptance rates are for you, hopefully there will be one from a reasonable provider. Aqua are big in the credit building market, they report to all of the agencies but their cards aren’t exactly competitive. If your acceptance rate is low, you can try with a bank account to start with instead.
Why do you need to use another bank as the primary account to help you a credit score?
Just having the other account is good enough, so long as you stop it going dormant. Monzo is my main account but I still have RBS and Barclays on the side.
Internal credit score is good if you want credit with that bank. If the OP just wants to improve his overall credit score so he can use Monzo with the additional account on the side.
