Credit Expert Online Credit report Review

Overall Rating

The information provided is worthwhile.

It is expensive, and the email alerts I found are useless.

CreditExpert is a company that provides credit reports for individuals wanting information about their credit scores, and therefore their likelihood of being lent money or rejected.

I paid a fee of 6.95 in order to access an account (and therefore my credit report). After that the customer you get a 30-day trial period and then a deduction is made from your account on a monthly basis.

The credit report, when given is long, but only mildly informative. You are given a credit rating which can be one of 'Very Poor; Poor; Fair; Good; Excellent'. You are also given a score on a scale of 0-1000. The lower the score, the greater the risk you are perceived as presenting to the credit companies and banks. You are also given details of all loans and credit that you have outstanding, which is followed by a series of circles - there are 12 for each previous month - and each contains a zero, if there are no missed payments; or a number 1,2, or 3 representing the number of missed payments you have had for each month. The system is fairly simplistic, but does not say which circle represents which month, so is not entirely clear.

As a member, you will receive email alerts, which tend to say things like 'someone, or an institution has accessed your account'. Having accessed my own account recently, I was unsure of whether it was my activity they were referring to. Another email gave a number of options - I may have missed a payment or cleared a debt. The alerts amounts to "some activity has occurred, but we don't know, or won't say what", which made them somewhat redundant.

CreditExpert contains information that we all want to know, but ultimately, you are left with the feeling of "so what", much of the information we know already - they do not contain information that is hidden, or secret, or that cannot be derived elsewhere - if you have never missed a payment, you will have excellent ratings, if you miss a number of payments, you will have poor ratings - the credit report ultimately confirms what we each already know about our credit.

I do believe it is worth the initial fee, but there is really no additional value to be gained from having monthly deductions paid to this company, for vague and meaningless emails.

One frustration I did have was in cancelling my account. They were quite happy for me to sign up for an account and take my credit details online, but when I had to cancel my account - I had to ring an 0800 number, and of course, there were options, and there was the dreaded "no agents are available right now" message waiting for me. This seemed a little unnecessary to me, and seemed to be somewhat spiteful against customers that wanted to leave - I rang from work, so wasn't concerned with the bill, but with such long waits for a response, it will cost you to leave.