Lenders are understandably wary of revealing details which could help someone put together a successful fraudulent application. They must, however, confirm whether or not a credit scoring system was used to process an application and, if so, give a simple explanation of how the system works. Consumers have the right to ask for their applications to be dealt with manually and not by an automated scoring system. A common query received by Experian concerns the fact that people sharing the same surname at the same address are linked on the CRA database. This link is known as an association.
Lenders sometimes take a family household's finances into account when making credit decisions.
This helps ensure that a family does not take on more commitments than it can afford. Lenders' experience shows that the finances of individual members of a family sharing a home often do impact on each other. Once a disassociation has been created, when any subsequent credit reference check is carried out, the lender sees only details of the person being searched and anyone with whom that person has a financial link. Details of the disassociated family member or members are not provided. When a disassociation is created by Experian, it notifies the other CRA and any lenders who have searched Experian's database for information about the person concerned in the past six months.