The credit bureau they don’t tell you about, an ‘internal’ ICB at Irish banks

Something which isn’t widely known is the way that banks keep internal credit scores. This isn’t the bit they report to the ICB which is well regulated and has various rules regarding how it is dealt with, this it the kind of thing they do for themselves which is not shared information.

Recently we had a client declined from a bank for something on their credit history, we searched and came up with nothing then found out via another route that there had been something with this bank 13 years ago when the person was still a student.

This person had taken out mortgages since then and had a perfect credit history, nothing went awry (the only issue was back when they were in college), but that old event came back to haunt them.

Big deal? Probably not, but then think about the potential fallout for people who opt for personal insolvency? What if the banks do the same to them? Where they are not locked out officially from financial services but they are in fact an un-creditworthy client in …

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Difficulties with mortgage repayments?

The Irish Bankers Federation has produced a guide for people who may be having difficulty in servicing their mortgage. This is a timely publication and relevant to many consumers. We previously published our Repossession Guide in early 2009 but it doesn’t cover the new Code of Conduct for Mortgage Arrears 2010 and the IBF one does.

Ultimately much of the information is common sense with some of the Code of Conduct being applied, having said that, it is vital to understand and utilise the information contained in the guide if you find yourself in difficulty, as this may be the only thing standing between you and a pointless repossession. Losing your home is one thing, doing it unnecessarily is another.

There is a wider question in Ireland about how we are going to solve our mortgage mess, the figures of houses in serious arrears continue to increase and forbearance cannot become a long …

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Talk the talk and walk the walk (economically speaking)

I wrote an article back at the end of 2005 called ‘the changing face of the mortgage market’ and I sent it off to a few newspapers and several magazines, it went largely un-noticed, when I say ‘largely’ I actually mean ‘totally’. Apparently I was ranting lunacy or something close to it, if you know me you’ll also know that this was a possibility….

Last weekend in a smokey Krakow it was mentioned during a conversation that you need to make a call on things and then fall on your face when you are wrong but remain vindicated when you are right. In the spirit of that conversation (with thanks to our own resident Enda Munnelly) I will list the predictions I had and then we can either collectively laugh at me or not. The main thing is that I put my predictions on the line and show whether or not I can walk the walk.

1. More than 100%!

Traditionally there were two things stopping people from getting a mortgage, the first was qualifying for the loan, the second …

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