What have your driving licence and passport got to do with being accepted for credit?

More than you may think! The very first thing lenders will do when deciding whether or not to accept you for credit is make sure you are who you say you are.

Sound obvious? You’d be surprised at how many people have the different addresses, and even different names on their passport, driving licence and credit report.

To give yourself the best possible chance of being accepted, they all need to match up.

What are they checking?

Lenders will check the details that you put on your application form, and the ones on your credit report, against the passport and driving licence databases to make sure they’re the same. If they’re not, you’ll probably get a big fat no.

So, if your name and address aren’t up to date, get them fixed before you apply for credit.

New name or address?

Firstly, update your passport, which you can find out how to do here. Then change your name and address on your driving licence, which you can here and here.

Next, tell the credit reference agencies. If you don’t tell them about a name change, they’ll think you’re new to the credit world and you’ll have to start building up your report from scratch.

Get in touch and ask them to link your new name with your old name so you don’t waste all of your hard work. They won’t do this automatically – so get on their case! Here are their websites:

CredAbility

ClearScore, who work with Equifax 

Arghhh, something’s wrong on my credit report!

Don’t panic! If you’ve checked your report and there’s something wrong on it, it’s pretty straightforward to get it changed.

Get in touch with the credit reference agencies (their details are above). Make sure you contact all three, so they’re all up to date.  

Let them know what’s wrong and they should put this right. It might take a few weeks to update, so keep checking back to make sure it’s done.

Then you should be good to go!