Credit Reports – A clean credit report always works for you.
Credit reports used to be supplied to people from the three major suppliers through a very laborious procedure, which also cost a good deal of money. If one went to Experian or TRW, for example, one would have to fill out a myriad of forms and wait two to three weeks until a detailed credit report was mailed to the user. It typically cost fifty dollars to obtain such a report, and there was little price competition between the major offerers of reports. Free instant credit reports have changed this industry dynamic. While the same ‘big three' suppliers are still the primary gatherers of credit information, they have special agreements with free instant credit report companies, which are able to offer a volume-influenced discount to the users. They attach virtual advertising, such as that offered by Google, in order to monetize access to the free credit reports. In addition, they offer only a ‘bare-bones' credit report, and attempt to upgrade the customers to a paid service which either gives them more detail, or gives them a subscription-based service for a given period of time to assure that the user is tied into the service over a longer period of time.
The latest trend is to go for free annual credit reports, offered by the three main credit report gatherers, who have control over the primary data. In doing so, they are able to cut out the middleman and appeal directly to the end-use consumer. If this is of interest, they can then lure the consumer to purchase other services, such as credit alerts, which are sent if there is a major change to the credit rating, or to a monthly reporting service which gives a general temperature of the client's credit score, and gives them the chance to improve their credit score through online tools and credit ‘tailoring' which allows them to improve their score by up to twenty percent.
In the future, free annual credit reports will be standard for the credit reporting agencies. The reason is that they recognize this as a new revenue source. There is also substantial political pressure to insure that the credit reports are given nominally free to the users, in order to keep them apprised of their status.