Credit cards, store cards, mortgages, loans... Borrowing from any kind of credit provider can have an impact on your credit score. To understand how Zilch affects your credit score, first let’s take a look at what a credit score is...

Your credit score is a number that represents your overall financial health and it’s generated by credit reference agencies, like Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. These companies hold information on your financial history – including how much you’ve got coming in, what you’ve got going out, plus whether you have a history of paying your bills on time.

Credit reference agencies look at all of this data to calculate your credit score – usually a number between 350 and 800 – and this number helps responsible lenders, such as Zilch, decide how much you can afford to borrow. Our priority will always be to ensure you’re not borrowing outside of your means.

If you have a history of managing money responsibly, being sensible with your borrowing and repaying on time, you're likely to have a good credit score. However, if you’ve missed payments or have borrowed more than you can afford, your score will likely be lower.

Well, we share information on your Zilch transactions back with credit reference agencies – which means that if you miss any payments, your score might go down. This gets worse the longer the payment is overdue. That’s why it’s really important to never borrow more than you comfortably afford and pay off any outstanding debts as soon as you can.

The good news is, if you keep up to date with all your credit payments – that includes Zilch and any other credit providers – you might see your credit score improve over time.

When you join Zilch, we’ll run an affordability check to see if we can pre-approve you. If we can’t approve you, we’ll have only run a soft search, which has no effect on your credit score. If you decide to join Zilch and accept our credit agreement, we’ll let credit reference agencies know by running a hard search. This will then appear on your credit report. But the most important thing to remember is to keep up to date with payments – it’s missing payments that will affect your credit score.

If you’re having financial difficulties, please let us know as soon as possible so we can try to help. We might be able to arrange a new payment plan or change the date you make payments.

It’s important to keep an eye on your credit report and report any inaccuracies. If you spot something that doesn’t look right, contact Zilch or the relevant company. Credit reference agencies can also raise a dispute on your behalf.