CreditLadder review

When you’re a young professional, there are a few certainties in your financial life: one is that you’ll spend too much on gin and tonics, another one is the standing order with which you pay the rent on the first day of the month and the third is that the two of them combined mean you’ll only have spare change to do your grocery shopping for the remaining 29 days.

Rent doesn’t exactly come cheap these days, so why not use it to improve your credit history? CreditLadder can help with that. The service it offers is over 5 years old and can help you build a positive credit history with the 3 main UK credit reference agencies (Experian, Equifax and TransUnion) and Crediva.

Explain CreditLadder to me in 3 sentences

1. CreditLadder is a service that allows you to have your rent payments recorded in one of your Experian, Equifax, TransUnion and Crediva credit reports for free or all for a fee.

2. Potential lenders will see them, so paying the rent on time each month helps you establish yourself as a reliable borrower who can keep up with regular payments.

3. CreditLadder could be particularly useful for people who don’t have much of a credit history yet to help them build one and access more affordable credit.

How does it work?

It’s fairly simple:

• CreditLadder connects to your bank account through Open Banking. When you sign up, you’ll be asked to grant CreditLadder read-only access to your transactions. CreditLadder can then identify and track your rent payments. It can work with 95% of bank accounts – you’ll need to be paying the rent from a supported current account, or you can’t use the service.
• It reports your payments to Experian, Equifax, TransUnion or Crediva (or all 4 for £5/month). The credit reference agency (CRA) will add your rent payments to your credit report. Experian, Equifax and TransUnion are the 3 largest CRAs in the UK.
• Lenders can see the payment history and take it into account when deciding. If they do and you make your rent payments on time, you could be offered better rates than you normally would.

How does having my rent payments on my credit report help me?

It isn’t easy to quantify, but there are a few things to consider.

First of all, signing up to the scheme makes it easier to prove your identity online, which means that, for example, you may be able to open a bank account without having to provide physical proof of identity. Experian says that with the scheme, the proportion of tenants who can prove their identity online will go from 39% to 84%.

Things are trickier when it comes to actually improving your credit score. Experian says that 79% of tenants would benefit from the scheme by seeing their credit score go up. But that’s only if lenders decide to take rental data into account, which is not standard practice yet.

For now, rental records appear on your credit file but won’t automatically feed your Experian credit score (the silver lining being that if you pay the rent late once, it shouldn’t damage your credit score either).

An Experian spokesperson told Finder: “More than 1 million tenants now have their rent payment records included in their Experian credit report, which both they and lenders can see, but it won’t have an additional impact on their credit score just yet. Several lenders are now testing the data before they incorporate it into their decision-making, which is the usual process for new data sets. So, it’s not yet factored into people’s credit scores, but this should soon change.”

Ultimately, like paying back a loan on time, making on-time rent payments can demonstrate to future would-be lenders you’ve been responsible with your financial obligations.

Who is behind CreditLadder?

CreditLadder launched in 2016. The CEO is Sheraz Dar, who previously worked in various digital businesses, including OpenRent. CreditLadder was the first company to report to Experian’s Rental Exchange scheme.

The Rental Exchange scheme is a partnership between The Big Issue and Experian. It was born in 2010, but only since October 2018 have rent payments been appearing on tenants’ credit files.

What’s the good and the bad of CreditLadder?

It’s worth noting that any boost to your credit score isn’t guaranteed. For example, if you keep up with rent payments (and CreditLadder reports these to credit agencies) but miss credit card repayments, your score will go down, not up.

How much does it cost?

The basic service that includes reporting to 1 credit agency only (you can choose Experian, Equifax, TransUnion and Crediva) is completely free.

If you sign up to the CreditLadder annual plan (for £5/month) or CreditLadder Advanced monthly plan (for £8/month), it will report to all 4 agencies (Experian, Equifax, TransUnion and Crediva).

Alternatives to CreditLadder

Making rent count towards your credit score may seem like a fairly obvious thing to implement, but it’s actually very new. For now, only CreditLadder reports rent payments to all 3 biggest CRAs in the UK.

However, instead of self-reporting through CreditLadder, you can also ask your landlord to report directly to Experian’s Rental Exchange scheme for you. Council or social housing tenants can do it, and so can private tenants if their landlord or agency manages at least 500 properties.

The other option for self-reporting is another startup called Canopy. It reports your rent payments to the Rental Exchange too, while also building a “digital rental profile” that allows you to instantly prove to potential landlords you can afford the rent, making reference and affordability checks way quicker. CreditLadder is planning a similar service, but it hasn’t launched yet.

Finally, don’t forget that there are multiple ways to build your credit history, and some are more straightforward than making your rent count. Make sure you’re on the electoral roll and try to never miss payments. You could also consider a specific credit builder product, such as LOQBOX or a credit builder credit card.

Frequently asked questions

• What happens if my landlord refers me to CreditLadder? Can I refuse?

  Totally. If you don’t want your rent payments to be reported to Experian, Equifax or TransUnion, you cann’t be forced to accept it. “It is always the tenant’s choice whether they wish to sign up. The tenant is the only one who can consent to share their data with us through Open Banking,” says CreditLadder.

• Is CreditLadder safe?

  CreditLadder is registered and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). It accesses your banking information in a read-only mode, using open banking, so there’s no way money can be taken from your bank account that way. Finally, if you’re worried about your bank login details, know that CreditLadder doesn’t store them. Instead, “once you initially sign up through our FCA-regulated partner TrueLayer, they obtain an encrypted token for read-only access to your account,” says CreditLadder.

• Can I ask my lender to take my rental data into account when assessing my application?

  You can certainly try, but most lenders have their own assessing system in place and might not be willing to change it in the near future.

• Do rent arrears affect my credit score?

  As we’ve said, rent payments are not normally reported to the credit reference agencies. However, arrears might be if, for example, your landlord takes you to court and you thus receive a CCJ (county court judgement). Unless paid in full within 30 days, a CCJ stays on your credit report for 6 years.