Credit Bureaus Questions
Generally a credit bureau is a company that stores your credit information that they has collected from your creditors. Your creditors normally have a relationship with one or several credit bureau that allow your creditors to regularly contribute your credit information to credit bureaus, usually on a monthly reporting schedule. Credit bureaus are then able to sell the credit information in their files back to your creditors or to other companies and users who are permitted by law to obtain your credit information.
What is a credit reporting company?
Generally a credit reporting company is a credit bureau or a similar company that sells credit report information to companies and users permitted by law to obtain credit information. However, not all credit reporting companies are credit bureaus who store credit information. Some credit reporting companies buy credit information from credit bureaus and resell the information to authorized users of credit reports. For example, a mortgage credit reporting company may buy credit report information from a credit bureau and resell the information to a mortgage lender.
Certainly your creditors keep track of your credit. For example, if you have an auto loan from a lender, the lender will keep track of your payments, how much you paid, when they received your payment, and if the payment was on time or late.
Such payment histories may also be provided to a credit bureau. In the US there are 3 national credit reporting agencies that store the majority of your credit information – Experian, Equifax and Trans Union. Smaller independent credit bureaus normally contribute their credit information to one of the 3 national credit reporting agencies.
There are other places who keep track of your credit, notably Innovis, but such companies are not used broadly at this time. Other places like Chexsystems keep track of bad checks written by consumers, but writing a bad check is not necessarily a credit transaction. Bad checks normally only appear on your credit report after they have been turned over to a collection agency for collecting, or after they have become an item of public record, such as a judjment.
