AnnaMaria Andriotis

speaker

201 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2018 last heard Oct 2019

AnnaMaria Andriotis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · Paying Your Cellphone Bill Can Boost Your Credit Score · 19 Dec 2018 podcast

That is correct.

In most cases, credit reports and credit scores have not included this information, and that is about to change.

Experian, one of the largest credit reporting firms in the U.S., has decided that it will start allowing consumers to add cell phone bill payments and utility payments into their credit reports.

So there's two kind of interesting things here happening.

One is, as you pointed out, that data that for the most part was not in people's credit reports will be added in and it'll be added in by consumers.

By the lenders.

Or does the consumer actually have to take action here?

for decades credit reports and credit scores have been based on information that lenders and other parties like collection firms have been submitting to the credit reporting firms who then put it on the credit report.

Now what's happening is that Experian is saying to the consumers you can add your payment data into your own credit report and the way that that would happen is

is that consumers would basically link their checking account, for the most part it would be a checking account, that they have online bill pay set up with.

So you know when you log into your bank account and you set up your payment for your electric bill, your cell phone bill, that information, once you link your account to Experian,

that information will just be getting fed into Experian.

So on the credit report, it's not like you're going to have to take a step every single month.

It would be a one-time thing where you set it up, you link your bank account to Experian, and Experian then is tracking where you're making recurring monthly payments to.

So they'd be able to see that every month you're paying your cell phone provider, you're paying your electric provider.

Well, that's a good question.

It's interesting because the track record you mentioned here in particular would have to do with Equifax's, a separate company from Experian.

Equifax's major breach last year.

In the wake of that

breach disclosure, congressional members during the testimony when the company was before congressional members, one of the things that would come up every now and then would be, well, why don't consumers have more control over the data that's at the credit reporting firms?

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