Get Your Canadian Credit Bureau Report

1. What does a credit bureau do?

Credit organizations help people and businesses complete financial transactions. Each year millions of people use credit cards, lease cars, negotiate loans, apply for jobs, and insure their lives, health, homes and property. To process these transactions securely and efficiently, all participants require timely and reliable personal information. A credit bureau is a central repository of information for its members. In turn, we secure and maintain this database and allow its use only by our member banks, retailers, insurers, and other organizations for establishing and maintaining relationships with their customers.

2. What information do they manage?

A credit organization gathers and reports information that consumers and businesses recognize as necessary to conduct business. For example, for a lender to approve a credit transaction, we collect and provide information about a consumer's loans and credit cards, including the dates opened, dates of last activity, terms agreed to, balances, current status of accounts, and payment histories.

Consumers have the right to review their own file, to ask questions, and to correct inaccurate information.

3. What do they do with this information?

Information is gathered and stored in databases for retrieval when a transaction takes place. The information they maintain is historical in nature and used repeatedly. For example, before making a loan, one of the most common methods for determining credit worthiness is to review how a person has managed their financial obligations in the past. Historical information is purged automatically as it ages according to established guidelines in order to ensure that the information retained by the bureau is timely, relevant, and meets legal requirements.


4. Who can request or obtain consumer information?

The consumer, who is the subject of the report, has the right to know the contents of a report provided about him or her. Information received or reported by a credit bureau is available to the individual consumer. If a consumer questions any information in the report, we will verify the information and make any corrections if the information is incorrect or outdated. If we are unable to confirm any particular piece of information, we will remove it from the report. If we have confirmed that a piece of information is correct on a consumer report, yet the consumer still has a concern, we will include the consumer's statement about this disputed information on their credit report.