Reply To: Curve and mortgage applications

[jj]

@sturgeon, I’m afraid that it’s impossible to answer your question, as the UK has several hundred mortgage providers and each of these has its own approach to risk management. Unlike the USA, we have no single credit score that is used by many lenders; most large lenders will have their own in-house scores, and just one of the credit bureau, Equifax, has multiple scores that may be used by smaller providers. These scores do not move in tandem; it’s common for a person to rank well on MGILF04 but poorly on EIILF91 or RNILF01, for example.

Curve usage probably won’t hurt your application, but it might. Using a credit card for cash-like transactions (which Fronted does) could hurt some newer scores, for example.

Large month-end drawings against credit cards compared with either the credit limit or your salary would also reflect poorly on many credit scores. For example, my Experian score plummeted a while back when I paid about £25K on my Virgin Atlantic card as part payment for a car. I cleared the balance in full when the statement landed, but the presence of a large balance on one measurement date affected my credit score for about 6 months.