Ways of receiving information from a counterparty’s credit history

Credit histories of individuals and legal persons (or subjects of a credit history) contain collected, processed, accumulated and stored data concerning fulfilment of commitments under loan agreements, or other contracts or obligations. Special business entities, credit bureaus, are engaged in this activity. According to the State Register of Credit Bureaus which is maintained by the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, there are 17 entities of the kind in Russia.

The article 6 On credit histories of the Federal Law No.218-FZ from December 30, 2004 (as amended on July 3, 2016) Provision of a credit report regulates obtaining information from the credit history in the form of a credit report.

Credit bureaus are entitled to provide a credit report at a credit history user’s request based on a contract of information services provision, concluded between a user and a credit bureau. In order to become a credit history user a person has to receive a written or other recorded consent from the subject of the credit history to get a credit report, with an obligatory statement of purposes of obtaining such information. The consent is valid for 2 months, or during the whole loan agreement period.

A credit report can only be provided in the form of an electronic document with a digital signature.

Credit history users are obliged to hold information confidential.

In practical terms, the procedure of obtaining data from a credit history might be as follows:

• 1) in order to get full information of the counterparty’s loan sources one should turn to the Central Catalogue of Credit Histories. It is a department of the Central Bank entitled to maintain the database of title parts of credit histories (surname, name, patronymic, passport data, tax number – INN, insurance individual account number). As a result, one can get a complete list of credit bureaus keeping the details of the counterparty’s credit history.
  Any credit bureau can conduct this search.
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  2) in order to get the details of the counterparty’s credit history, one should turn to a certain credit bureau, conclude an agreement for information provision, register with an e-service, create an account and pay for the service. Besides, one should provide and pay for all technical, software and communications resources required for using of the e-service.

The mandatory requirements for getting a detailed credit history are:

• a written consent of the subject for receiving a credit report, stating the purposes for obtaining this information;
• a digital signature;
• installed encryption software to ensure safe transfer of personal data;
• a safety certificate in accordance with the legislation on personal data.