Providing a valuable service
Today, BIK cooperates closely with 36 banks and saving societies.
According to the stipulations of the Banking Law, every bank is required to evaluate its clients' ability to pay back loans and assess the risk of lending to them. That can often be a costly process, and has a direct impact on a banks' financial resources.
BIK does the banks' work for them, by managing and developing a database of credit-related information by gathering, storing, processing and distributing information in the form of a credit report about banks' clients' loan history. Thus, when someone applies for a loan, a bank can obtain information from BIK in the form of a credit report about the client's previous loans, and whether he has any liabilities or debts. The service is proving extremely valuable. "In October we surpassed the 20 million mark as far as credit reports go," the president of BIK, Krzysztof Markowski boasts.
Borrower benefits
"The existence of reliable information systems is a signal of the country's position in the international market. For the banks it guarantees the security of their assets and their proper allocation," the president of the Polish Bank Association Krzysztof Pietraszkiewicz said.
But there are benefits for the banks' clients as well. Thanks to the loan reports provided by BIK, a potential borrower no longer has to worry about the need to provide the bank with information about his existing financial obligations, which saves the client time and money.
"I know of one bank which offers clients with good ratings a lower interest on loans. One of the rating criteria is a report from BIK," the office's vice-president, Mariusz Wyżycki, said. Contrary to popular belief, the database is not a blacklist. According to Wyżycki, only five percent of the clients in the database have problems with paying back their loans.
Progress report
All banks, as well as other institutions with the power to provide loans, have the right to access the information provided by BIK. Apart from the credit report, which a bank can receive when a client applies for a loan at one of its branches, banks also have access to monitoring reports, which show a clients' progress in debt-paying and their obligations to other institutions. Another product that BIK offers is the BIKSco - a score which rates a client's punctuality in paying back his loans. "This can be used by banks to compliment their own applications," Markowski said.
BIK has development plans for the future as well. Apart from expanding their individual client database, it is working on a database for corporate clients. "We will launch this service next year. This will be particularly important for SMEs, because banks find it hard to assess their loan capacity," Markowski explained.
