FAQs: RentTracking™

What does Credit History mean?

Your credit history is a record of how you manage your money and use credit. It gives a detailed look at your current and past credit lines such as any credit card, loan or mortgage you may have. It keeps track of whether you’ve been keeping up with any agreed repayments and also reflects how diligent you have been paying your bills.

If you’ve just turned 18, are new to the UK, or just haven’t had a credit card or a loan in the last few years, your credit history is likely to be fairly unsubstantial.

Your credit history has a significant influence on your credit score. For instance, you may have a lower credit score if your credit history shows records that may look negative, such as late payments and defaults.

Will Rent Tracking harm my credit score?

As with any other type of credit, timely payments will have a positive impact on your credit score whilst showing late payments or defaults can harm your credit score. Be sure to pay your rent when it is due and Rent Tracking will work its magic for you.

Each of the two Credit Reference Agencies in the UK work differently. For this reason, using Rent Tracking may have slightly different impact on your credit history and your credit score. At any time, you can request a copy of your credit report from any of the two Credit Reference Agencies and are also able to dispute anything that looks incorrect to you.

If you are struggling to pay for your rent, make sure to follow the Citizens Advice recommendations which can be found here.

Why does having a good credit score matter?

When looking at purchasing financial products such as loans, mortgages or insurance plans, lenders (or financial services firms) may look at a number of factors including your credit score and your credit history. This is to help them assess your affordability and the likelihood that you will be repaying on time.

Having a good credit score can help get you access to the best financial products, such as credit with lower interest rates, better terms and availability on loans and mortgages, the best credit cards and discounts on insurance products.

How does it work?

When setting up Rent Tracking, you tell Canopy about your rent payments amount and frequency, as well as give access to the open banking data from the account you pay your rent from. Each month, this helps us identify your rent payments from within all of your transactions.

For each month where a rent payment is found, we will let the two Credit Reference Agencies know that we have identified a rent payment for you. In time, this will appear in your credit record.

If however we were unable to identify a rent payment for a given month, you will be asked to help us find the payment in question or to tell us the reason why it may not have been made. We will then pass that information onto the two Credit Reference Agencies.