Alerted to disinformation – Experian’s CreditExpert woes

In my Inbox this morning is an e-mail “Alert” from CreditExpert - the brand name for a membership based credit reference services from Experian (one of the UK’s leading credit referencing and scoring companies).

The reason this alert is pants is because it doesn’t actually alert me to anything useful, it just makes me alerted to fact that Experian, for whatever reason, have chosen not to be helpful. Let me explain; the e-mail states the following:

“CreditExpert has detected one or more of the following changes to your Experian® credit report for the week ending 15/06/2008:

• The addition or deletion of an account
• A change in the payment history of a credit account
• The addition or deletion of a judgment, voluntary arrangement or bankruptcy
• A search of your credit report
• The addition or deletion of a Notice of Correction
• The settlement of an account
• A significant balance change on an active account"

So basically, I am being alerted to the fact that something has changed on my credit file and it could be as insignificant as “balance change on an active account” which will happen every time a payment gets paid by direct debit to a credit card, or it could be as life changing as “The addition... of a... bankruptcy”.

In my opinion, Experian should either send a simple e-mail stating a change to your account has taken place or give a detailed and insightful explanation of what specifically has changed on your account – which is what their main competition, Equifax do.

Equifax provide me with an alert to a change of my account, then when I log into my account I get a summary page that within one click provides me with the exact detail of what has changed and why, whereas, when logging into my Experian CreditExpert account I am provided with the same useless information. It is almost as though they are scaremongering.

Both Equifax and Experian have recently updated their service tools to the end user (you and me), such that your credit file is now easier to read and credit scoring is more intelligible.

One thing that is to Experian’s credit (pun intended) is that they only charge £5.99 for a credit scoring whereas Equifax still charge a (competitively exorbitant for a single-use service) £14.99.