Use of the Positive Credit Register at OP Financial Group

We use the Positive Credit Register maintained by the Finnish Tax Administration when assessing the granting of new loans to our customers or changes to previously granted loans.

The Positive Credit Register provides up-to-date information concerning a private individual’s income and debt. It helps lenders evaluate their customers’ solvency more accurately and in a more balanced way. The register is aimed at preventing households becoming over-indebted.

The register also helps customers understand their own financial standing better.

This credit register is called "positive" because it does not contain any negative credit data entries such as delinquency or enforcement entries.

 

The register will be implemented in two steps

The Tax Administration will maintain the register and open it in two steps.

  1. Starting from February 2024, lenders will report consumer credit information and comparable credit information to the register. These include home loans, credit card debts, car loans, other consumer loans, student loans and hire purchase agreements. Lenders can retrieve this information from the register starting from 1 April 2024.
  2. From December 2025 onwards, lenders will report loans granted to companies and private traders to the register. Lenders will be able to use the information starting from 1 April 2026.

 

Who can view my information in the credit register?

Private individuals can only see their own information in the online service for the credit register. They have no access to other people's information.

Lenders such as banks and financial institutions can view consumers' information only as decreed in the legislation:

  • Before making a credit agreement, to evaluate a consumer's creditworthiness
  • After making a credit agreement if the credit amount or credit limit is significantly raised
  • When the consumer applies for a change to the credit terms and conditions and the change requires the assessment of the consumer's creditworthiness (repayment holidays, a reduction in the repayment amount or an extension of the loan term, for example)
  • To evaluate a guarantor or the issuer of a third-party collateral

 

How does OP Financial Group use the Positive Credit Register?

According to the Consumer Protection Act, we are obligated to assess a person's creditworthiness before making a credit agreement with them. We will use information stored in the Positive Credit Register to assess our customers’ creditworthiness when we are deciding whether to grant

  • Secured and unsecured consumer financing
  • Consumer-customer card-based credit
  • Vendor cooperation financing such as car loans. 

The register will provide us with information about private individuals’ loans and income over the last 12 months.

Additional information about the use of the Positive Credit Register

We will inform you in advance that we will check your information

Like all lenders, OP Financial Group is obligated to inform the customer in advance that their information will be retrieved from the Positive Credit Register. At the same time, we must indicate which register we will use for retrieving information.

If we are forced to reject a loan application based on information obtained from the Positive Credit Register, we need to inform the customer of this as soon as the decision is made.

Because creditworthiness is also assessed based on the information provided by the customer and negative credit data, it is very rare that the rejected credit decision will only be based on information obtained from the Positive Credit Register.

 

Disclosure of information retrieved from the register

The Act on the Positive Credit Register also lays down the situations in which the lender may further disclose the information obtained from the register. A lender may disclose information obtained from the register to the following parties:

  1. The State Treasury if the lender claims compensation based on the Act on State Guarantees for Owner-Occupied Housing Loans
  2. The guarantor and the issuer of third-party collateral so that they can fulfil the duty-to-inform under section 12 of the Act on Guaranties and Third-Party Pledges (before the guarantee is given) and section 14 of the same Act (the guarantor's request for access to information during the validity of the guarantee). However, such information must not be retrieved from the register at the request of the guarantor or the third-party collateral issuer.

 

Authorities supervising the use of the register

Lenders are obligated to report the information about loans specified in the legislation to the Positive Credit Register. Compliance with the reporting obligation is supervised by the Finnish Financial Supervisory Authority.

The use of credit reports obtained from the register for evaluating creditworthiness is supervised by the Consumer Ombudsman and the Financial Supervisory Authority.

The disclosure and use of the Positive Credit Register reports only for the permitted purposes, as well as all other personal data processing related to the register, are supervised by the Data Protection Ombudsman.