[Noisebridge-discuss] Bringing Down the Credit Bureaus

[Brian Molnar]

On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 8:57 PM, Christie Dudley <longobord at gmail.com> wrote:

> A couple of things:
> 1) I don't see any recognition of "good" credit.  This is reported on your
> credit rating too, after all.  It's very important to everyone involved.
>

Unless I'm mistaken, "good credit" means the number of accounts that are
held in good standing. This information would certainly be available.
Particularly, one could see how many accounts an individual has and how long
he/she has held the accounts in good standing, without negative claims made
against them.

Currently, I don't think lending institutions go out of their way to make
positive notations to the credit file of someone who consistently pays
on-time, or whether such a thing is even possible. But I could certainly
imagine our service offering that.


2) One thing that's not included in the portion of your credit report that's
> given to you, but is given to potential creditors is your arrest record.
>  Landlords especially like to see this.  It's a horrible thing to have,
> considering it's not something that's reviewed for accuracy by anybody and
> you have no rights regarding it's contents ("Because it doesn't matter,
> right?")
>

I consider the two concepts mutually orthogonal but I might be thinking too
ideally about that. I wonder how important this info is to creditors. How
common is is for larger institutions to check this sorta thing? I could
definitely see the case with landlords, but I'm wondering if, for instance,
credit card or cell phone companies care. My gut feeling is that this may
not be all too important, but I may be wrong.



3) All of the current credit bureaus share information, so the creditor has
> the most complete, accurate information to make a decision on.  How could
> this system work with existing systems?  It seems to me that it would
> require all creditors in the world to subscribe at once, which simply isn't
> likely, or even possible.
>
>
Yes, we have a bit of a boot-strapping problem. That is, people already have
credit histories, but we wouldn't have that data. As a personal preference I
would like to keep it that way. I sorta consider the data kept by the credit
bureaus to be tainted in a sense. This data was collected under a different
set of policies and with a different dispute/fairness mechanism.

Thus initially everybody would have a clean slate, but over time, once more
and more accounts are registered with the system, the credit histories are
slowly built-up. That means, at first, companies would need to check this
system along with the existing credit bureaus, but eventually this could be
the single go-to source for credit history.

This poses a problem for adoption. What's the incentive to use this system
if you still have to use the old systems? So it's certainly a problem we'd
need to think about and try to solve.



>
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