Looking to get a free credit score and credit report each month? And without any ads or follow-up spam calls later for credit cards or loans? May seem surprising, and almost impossible, seeing the plethora of such apps or websites around, but OneScore has stuck to that promise so far.
The company is founded by Anurag Sinha, Rupesh Kumar and Vibhav Hathi – all former ICICI Bank-ers. Anurag is also a former colleague from Walnut, where he was instrumental in setting up Walnut Prime (Line of Credit for Walnut app users). He’d mentioned his new company and app name when we’d met a few months ago, and some of us had checked out the OneScore app at the time.
Till now I had only requested my annual free credit report from CIBIL and used to check on their website once in a while for any changes or discrepancies. I make all payments on time and in full (no revolving credit, thanks) and had an idea about my credit score range, so didn’t really bother using any other app for this. One such recent app I checked out of curiosity was CRED – for credit card payments. CRED fetches your credit score and credit report from Experian and CRIF High Mark credit bureaus (one time, when you sign up). Some other friends/colleagues have used other apps around, which are invariably followed by loads of spam emails and calls for loans/credit cards, so I’d stayed away from such aggregator apps/websites.
OneScore is a simple and straightforward app, and doesn’t ask for any permissions. Once you input your phone number and email id, it fetches your free credit score and credit report from Experian. Information about your current credit score, utilised limit, history of all payments (including late payments if any), list of all active and closed loan and credit card accounts, age of credit accounts, recent enquiries in 30 days etc are all neatly displayed in the app.
So long as you use the app, you can get your updated free credit score and credit report each month. The credit utilisation was off to quite an extent, probably because some banks hadn’t reported the latest overall credit limit correctly. Got to know later that there is also an AI-based credit score improvement planner in the app, which is shown to you if you have a low credit score.
In case you notice a discrepancy, you can send an email to Experian from the app itself. I saw an incorrect entry from SBI and emailed Experian, who took their own sweet time to check and finally get back to say it was genuine as confirmed by the bank. I had to then file a complaint on the SBI website to get them to look into it, and although they say it has been resolved, I guess only a visit to their branch will finally close this.
Update: From August 2020 onwards, the OneScore app also fetches your free CIBIL score, in addition to Experian.
Download the OneScore app to get your free credit score and credit report, without ads or spam calls 😉
