On August 7th the European Commission released its comments on the draft Regulation of the European Central Bank concerning the collection of granular credit and credit risk data.
Though this opinion is non-binding for the ECB, it contains some useful comments. In particular, the EC would like to also have access to the data included in the AnaCredit database (granular and aggregated). It also calls to strengthen the Data Protection principles to protect the personal data that the database will be processing. Regarding the scope, it should include both consumer credits as well as business data, by all lenders (not just financial institutions) and cover cross border lending (overdrafts, credit cards, credit lines and other consumer credits as subcategories).To minimize the cost of data collection, the Commission thinks that data should be obtained where possible from existing databases. For instance, a lot of supplementary non-credit information on SMEs (including legal address, size, and number of employees) could be retrieved from the RIAD data base.
Importantly for the sector, if information feedback loops are created, public and private credit providers should be treated on an equal footing. Such treatment will prevent potential market distorting effects e.g. from empowering a public central register with data that is not available to private competing credit reporting service providers.
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