SCHUFA is Germany’s largest credit agency for credit checks and assessing the creditworthiness of private individuals. SCHUFA stores this data.
What is SCHUFA anyway?
SCHUFA stands for “Protection Association for General Credit Protection” and is Germany’s largest credit agency regarding the creditworthiness of private debtors. SCHUFA is a private, joint venture in the lending industry in the form of a holding company based in Wiesbaden. Your contractual partners are lending institutions such as banks or institutions in general that take credit risks with their customers in their daily business, including credit institutions, leasing companies or telecommunications companies.
SCHUFA provides inquiring companies with credit information about certain people so that companies can assess the business risks with this person. SCHUFA can therefore also be seen as a synonym for the creditworthiness of a private debtor. The SCHUFA credit rating is assessed with a score of 0 to 1,000, with 1,000 being the best possible credit rating. There are both positive and negative SCHUFA entries. According to the company’s key figures, SCHUFA has data on around 68 million private individuals and around 6.3 million companies.
This is what SCHUFA knows about a person
SCHUFA stores various data about a private individual to determine creditworthiness, but not every SCHUFA entry is negative. As SCHUFA reports in its annual risk and credit compass, around 91.1 percent of all people registered with SCHUFA have only positive entries in 2021.
According to its own information, SCHUFA stores personal data such as name, date of birth, place of birth and all addresses. According to SCHUFA, it also obtains information about the “commencement and contractual execution of a transaction”. These include current accounts, installment loans, credit cards, basic accounts or seizure protection accounts. For example, SCHUFA registers a recently taken out loan for the house and the associated debts. However, debts alone do not cause a negative entry; it is only the failure to pay the debts that has this negative effect. Debts paid on time can even result in positive endorsements and a better score. In addition, the credit agency collects information about outstanding, due and warning transactions and claims. In addition, fraudulent identity or creditworthiness is registered for the purpose of fraudulent activities. SCHUFA also has access to all public directories and publications, and a person’s personal credit score is also stored.
However, SCHUFA does not store the following data: A person’s assets and income as well as their current job are not recorded. Neither is marital status, nationality, religion, marketing data such as purchasing behavior or membership in organizations.
The majority of SCHUFA entries are stored for a further three years during ongoing claims and after the claim has been paid in full, just like in the event of personal bankruptcy.
When do you receive an entry and how does SCHUFA get the data?
SCHUFA works through contractual partners. This means that if a company is a SCHUFA partner, the customer receives a note with their contract informing them about the transfer of their data to SCHUFA. Since the GDPR, as SCHUFA explains on its own website, the consumer no longer requires specific consent by signing a so-called “SCHUFA clause”. Consumers also receive a SCHUFA information sheet that contains a detailed description of data processing at SCHUFA and thus supplements the SCHUFA information.
As soon as a private individual enters into such a contract with a SCHUFA contractual partner, the company can communicate the conclusion of a loan, cell phone contract or car leasing to SCHUFA.
SCHUFA says it does not collect any data from social media.
Self-disclosure – corrections are possible
In order to find out what data SCHUFA has stored about you and shares it with other companies when you request a credit check, a person can use the so-called SCHUFA data copy to get a free insight into all the data stored by SCHUFA. A credit report, on the other hand, costs a one-time fee of 29.95 euros. In addition to the stored data, this also contains the daily calculation of the creditworthiness score and official proof of creditworthiness (original certificate) for secure forwarding to third parties.
If incorrect information is stored or is incomplete, this can be reported personally to SCHUFA and corrected.
Editorial team finanzen.net