Affordability & Credit Checks

Affordability & Credit Checks

Affordability

As a responsible lender we aim to ensure you have sufficient resources to meet all your commitments including your loan payments.  Use the loan calculator to see what the monthly payments would be for the amount you wish to borrow.Remember to add on to the monthly repayment the minimum savings required. This is £10 per month for loans below £1,000 and £20 for loans above £1,000. 

Alternatively, if you know how much you can afford each month use the calculator to work out how much you could borrow given a fixed monthly payment and a fixed term.

In order to process your application, we will perform credit and identity checks on you with one or more credit reference agencies (“CRAs”). Where you take banking services from us we may also make periodic searches at CRAs to manage your account with us.

To do this, we will supply your personal information to CRAs and they will give us information about you. This will include information from your credit application and about your financial situation and financial history. CRAs will supply to us both public (including the electoral register) and shared credit, financial situation and financial history information and fraud prevention information.

We will use this information to:

• Assess your creditworthiness and whether you can afford to take the product;
• Verify the accuracy of the data you have provided to us;
• Prevent criminal activity, fraud and money laundering;
• Manage your account(s);
• Trace and recover debts; and
• Ensure any offers provided to you are appropriate to your circumstances.

We will continue to exchange information about you with CRAs while you have a relationship with us. We will also inform the CRAs about your settled accounts. If you borrow and do not repay in full and on time, CRAs will record the outstanding debt. This information may be supplied to other organisations by CRAs.

When CRAs receive a search from us they will place a search footprint on your credit file that may be seen by other lenders.

If you are making a joint application, or tell us that you have a spouse or financial associate, we will link your records together, so you should make sure you discuss this with them, and share with them this information, before lodging the application. CRAs will also link your records together and these links will remain on your and their files until such time as you or your partner successfully files for a disassociation with the CRAs to break that link.

The identities of the CRAs, their role also as fraud prevention agencies, the data they hold, the ways in which they use and share personal information, data retention periods and your data protection rights with the CRAs are explained in more detail at on our web site on our Terms and Conditions page.

As all loans with London Community Bank are reported to a Credit Agency, each monthly loan repayment helps enhance your Credit Score as we report all repayments made. Given this it is important to ensure all your repayments are made on time.