Individual borrowers accounted for 96 percent of the total number of unique borrowers in credit bureau agencies by the end of December 2019. This was revealed by the Bank of Ghana in an annual report on credit referencing activity released on October 5, 2020.
The report indicated that out of a total number of approximately 5.2 million unique borrowers in the credit bureau database, about 4.9 million of them were individual borrowers, representing 96 percent of total borrowers. This signifies that every unique borrower was entitled to two credit facilities.
“There [was] a total of 5,117,478 unique borrowers in the credit bureau database with Individual borrowers accounting for 96% of total borrowers. This represent an average of two (2) facilities per unique borrower”.
The remaining 21.3 thousand records representing 4 percent were corporate borrowers according to the report.
The report also added that by December 2019 there was a total number of about 23 million records contained in the credit bureaus database. Out of the 23million records, 22.3 million were individuals and the other 71.7 thousand represented corporate records. Also, both credit and non-credit information were included in the database.
“As at December 2019, the total number of records in the database of credit bureaus stood at 23,022,698. This includes both credit and non-credit information with 22,305,962 individual records and 716,736 corporate records”.
Again, the report said that non-credit information centered on issues relating to one’s identity, company records as well as information available in the public sphere.
“The non-credit information includes information in the public domain, ID information and company data and others”.
According to the Bank of Ghana, credit information available in the credit bureau database was broken down into two categories namely consumer records and commercial records. A chart of figures provided in the report indicated that whereas consumer records were extremely high at approximately 8.24 million, the total number of commercial records remained low at 429,206. This totaled approximately 8.7 million.
“The Credit bureaus recorded a total of 8,669,007 number of records with credit information as at December 2019. This is also made up of 8,239,801 individual credit records and 429,206 corporate credit information”.
The report went on to say that though there have been improvements in the credit bureau database, there are challenges with the quality of data. Data submitted to credit bureau agencies still lacked some important demographic information on the borrower’s identity, Date of Birth, and place of residence. This slowed data processing time and also affected the quality of credit reports generated by the credit bureau agencies.
“Regardless of the unique template for data submission by all lenders, the submitted data often lacks key information for credit bureau use. For instance, some data submitted to credit bureaus lacked critical demographic information such as Identity Information (ID), Date of Birth and residential addresses of borrowers. This affects the quality of credit reports generated by credit bureaus and prolongs the processing time for data by the credit bureaus as a lot of effort is put into sanitizing data before processing”.