I wonder whether as part of their discussions with Experian to get this off the ground, including a more detailed Experian report visible within the app as part of a Monzo Plus account was discussed/agreed on 
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Good to see Monzo adding Experian, hopefully Equifax is not far behind.
I work as Head of Dev for a finance provider and we use Equifax for credit reporting checks. Sad to say, not a single person has been accepted by our platform for both Monzo and Starling this is due to the reasons I put in this post last year Issues with Equifax / Vocalink Fraud Checks
Credit reference agencies are a necessary evil in the finance industry as it reduces fraud and ensures people can afford the repayments. It also keeps lenders accountable too because as borrowers, we can see if a lender is correctly reporting our accounts.
Personally, Iām full Monzo and I benefit from itās budgeting tools everyday. Now Monzo are reporting to Experian, Iām hoping Iāll have an easier time when I apply for my first mortgage next year.
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Experian has been absolutely horrid to me because I am a foreign national who isnāt eligible to register for the electoral roll.
Iāve contacted their support many times and I canāt even access the credit report they have on me, no matter what I do or who I talk to.
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Hey
This is all true. 
We cannot see any soft searches performed on you in either the āhardā or āsoft āsearch.
In fact, for TransUnion, the hard search returns exactly the same data as the soft search, with the only difference being that the hard search can be seen by other lenders, while the soft search cannot.
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Is it a case that you could give potentially give customers a choice of whats sent to both TransUnion and Experian?
- Searches (Soft ID checks, Soft Quotation, Hard Loan search)
- Account opened (and if in negative balance)
- Monthly income (and expenditure?)
- Personal loan (amount, monthly payments, amount remaining)
- Anything else the public donāt know aboutā¦
(Obviously if you wanted a loan you would have to probably agree to having the details sent.)
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The company I work for also has the same issue. (Every time iāve brought it up, Iām told itās not important by members on here)
We ended up manually performing the identity checks, which is labour intensive and frustrating.
Genuinely interested here, but do you only search one credit provider?
If so, why should Monzo report to all three vs other companies searching more than one?
(I know very little about how all this works, so Iād love to know a bit more!)
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I was under the impression that many companies outsource the decision making to one of the agencies based on a set of criteria.
In that case then surely thereās always somebody who loses out.
AFAIK very few companies report to all three, even the large ālegacyā banks.
I have a feeling you may be mistaken - most banks report to all 3 of the agencies plus your fraud prevention ones etc. however they are more selective with their searches.
MoneySavingExpert produced a guide on who searches who and who reports to who, Iāll try and pull that up.
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I will do my best to explain the general reason companies will/ wonāt use multiple credit reference agencies (CRAās).
For a given individual, CRAās generally hold a lot of the same information. One CRA will probably only differ from another about 10% of the time (A somewhat made up but realistic number).
Performing a credit search also costs the lender money (usually less than Ā£1 but still greater than Ā£0). They also must do this for every application rather than every credit product taken out.
So you can imagine this as a bit of an optimisation problemā¦
For a small amount of money (eg. A phone contract) it is only worth using one CRA because the small uplift you get by using two CRAās isnāt worth the extra cost.
For medium sized credit (eg. A loan of Ā£1k to Ā£15k) it is often worth using two CRAās because the small % uplift you get gets multiplied by the size of the loan. But using three CRAās is not worth it because that is a further diminishing improvement in better data.
For a large loan (eg. A mortgage of usually >Ā£100k) using a third CRA then becomes worth it because even that tiny diminishing % improvement gets multiplied by the size of the mortgage.
I hope this makes some sense? Let me know if you have any other questions 
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Thanks Theo - thatās really useful for me & hopefully for others too 
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I remember seeing a table on here previously which showed who reported to who and, iirc, there were very few who actually reported to all three.
@TheoGibson has given a great summary.
Money basically, Businessā pay per search, In credit you get a HUGE amount of applications that arenāt eligible. (at least triple the percentage you are thinking right now!)
If you are a smaller company, or really trying to offer the best value for money for the customer, you canāt use all 3. With that in mind, youād probably choose the biggest one or maybe 2, which would be Equifax and Experian. There isnāt a lack of demand for Credit and Transunion are the smallest of the bunch. So it makes sense thatās the one you donāt use.
This is a game changer for monzo customers, hats off to the guys for getting round to it!
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Iāve just found this table here, but I have no idea how up to date it is.
https://www.oceanfinance.co.uk/blog/which-credit-reference-agencies-do-lenders-use/
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Well itās got 2016 in the footer but a look on archive.org I couldnāt see it checking a few dates.
Also should note that table is for credit card checks.
@TheoGibson is it also true the CRAs pass data between themselves? So you could report to one and find it shared?
This was me asking JAJA back in August
We do not report to all three credit reference agencies, we provide information to TransUnion (formerly Call Credit), however, credit reference agencies do share information with each other.
Tymit response
Currently, we do use Experian but we reserve the right to use any of the three major credit bureaus.
Tandem
The credit check is performed with Experian, in general the agencies can share information so it is possible it will appear on all three. However, we only directly report to Experian so I can not advise specifically on this.
So anyone with a Tandem/Tymit card see the card listed in Clearscore or Credit Karma?
Or JAJA see the card in Clearscore or Experian/MSE creditclub?
@TheoGibson do you know a list of the hidden CRAs for the UK?
Crediva
Lexisnexis Risk Solutions Uk Limited
Crediva is a registered Credit Reference Agency (CRA) and provides UK consumer credit reference services, specialising in alternative credit scoring models to improve traditional credit risk analysis.
Thereās another Iāve seen called something like Kudos 
Iām not 100% sure on this Iām afraid.
My understanding was that they didnāt pass data between them (hence why you can see some accounts on one credit report but not on another) - but i could be wrong 
That is great, please also add to ClearScore as well. 
There are only 3 Credit Reference Agencies, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.
These feed all the other credit report providers (like ClearScore) who produce credit reports in different formats, but use the data from 1, 2 or all of the above big 3. Monzo now reports to Transunion and Experian and so would show on reports issued by credit report providers who use Transunion and/or Experian. And if Monzo also reported to Equifax, it would show up in all available credit report services.