This new tool shows Schufa customers which factors influence their creditworthiness. With the help of a free "score simulator", private individuals should now be able to better understand how and with which variables the credit agency calculates creditworthiness, or credit ratings, and how they can improve them.
The simulator and the improved accessibility, including more understandable language, towards consumers, could be a step towards more transparency. This launch is also a reaction to the "Consumer-friendly Scoring" report published in 2018 by the Advisory Council for Consumer Questions from the Ministry of Consumer Protection.
Schufa also wants to use the simulator to improve the financial education of consumers by explaining the factors influencing the score in more detail, for example how current accounts or credit cards affect them. In the future, according to Schufa's plans, consumers should be given the opportunity to actively improve their creditworthiness by passing on positively effective data. These include, for example, punctual serviced term mobile phone contracts or regular income.
The simulator now anonymously calculates a rough "bank score" that ranges in five levels from "excellent" to "unsatisfactory". The bank score is just one of the dozens of different credit reports that Schufa keeps about users. This is calculated based on 17 parameters that Schufa receives from business partners such as banks or payment institutions.
Apart from the simulator, in which the Schufa also only takes seven of these parameters into account for the sake of simplicity, the Schufa also shows users their degree of creditworthiness as a point value, or score. The bank score is not to be equated with the overarching base score, which is the statistical probability of a payment default across all application areas.
Users can use the simulator to see how different information affects their creditworthiness, for example, many instalment loans or credit cards running at the same time led to devaluation (higher risk of default), while an ongoing real estate loan or a current account that had been set up for a long time improved the score. According to Schufa, more than 1800 combinations are possible, through which consumers learn more about the importance of the factors. This includes, for example, that non-payments that occurred in a court of law automatically lead to insufficient creditworthiness.
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