Infact Consumer Support

What does Infact do?

Infact is a regulated Credit Reference Agency.

We provide information to help with credit risk and affordability assessments.

For example, this could be information such as how much debt someone has and how consistently they pay it off so that lenders can feed that information into their decisions about whether they should take on more debt or not.

We aim to provide a service that protects people from taking on debt that they cannot afford to repay by sharing information in a more timely way.

This helps lenders understand a clearer picture of a person's financial circumstances and make more accurate decisions about whether they should give them credit or not.

We also help lenders assess the risk of fraud in an application. The purpose of this is to help lenders reduce fraudulent lending and financial crime and protect people who may be the target of fraudulent behaviour.

How does Infact do what it does?

We provide a secure data platform that takes advantage of some of the most modern and well tested technologies. Your data is encrypted and protected from unauthorised access. Our systems and processes conform to the ISO 27001 standard – this is the internationally recognised the leading international standard for information security.

By building the service in house and on modern technologies we are able to share information faster than the traditional credit reference agencies and this allows us to keep your credit report more up-to-date than you might be used to.

We do this for a few reasons, here are some of them:

To help lenders make more responsible credit decisions helping assess whether a person can afford to repay their debts

To inform lenders on the active balance of your credit so that when you make payments against your existing loans they are reflected more quickly on your credit report demonstrating that you have capacity to take out a new loan

To help people build their credit report faster than they can in the existing market where data is shared with a significant delay.

To assess the fraud risk potential of a new credit application to protect the lender from issuing fraudulent loans and, where relevant, the person who is being defrauded.

We help share data about people to enable access to responsible and affordable credit.

We take feeds of data from lenders and other data providers, store that information, and then make it available back to lenders in a structured way to help them make more responsible lending decisions.

We also occasionally analyse the information that we store to provide additional insight to lenders. These summarised pieces of information allow lenders to reason over the data more easily. An example of this might be The Total Number of Active Credit Products on a credit report and this would simply be sent to our client as a number to describe, for example, that a person has "2" Active Credit Products.

Our regulatory permissions

Infact Systems Limited ("Infact") is authorised and regulator by the Financial Conduct Authority ("FCA").

You can find out more about regulated businesses, including Infact, on the FCA Register here

Infact is regulated to provide Credit Referencing and Credit Information Services. These are two similar permissions that regulate how we consume, store, use and share information about people and their financial products.

Our mission and values as a company are aligned to achieving the best outcomes for both people and financial services providers who we work with as we believe that by serving the best interest of people like you we can create an enduring business that services people and the financial services market most effectively.

Infact's mission and values

Infact is a mission driven business. We believe that by providing a modern service to the UK credit market we will can power better outcomes for people and their ownership of financial products.

Mission statement:

Infact's mission is to increase responsible lending through fair and transparent credit reporting.

Vision:

Provide the most effective consumer data for decisioning, through a simple service that helps lenders deliver better consumer outcomes.

Our Values:

We live and breathe our core values and created them as a team to encapsulate how we would like the work we do to be perceived by ourselves, our families, you and other people outside the business;

Fairness:

Credit referencing that is inclusive and fair.

Being fair is about representing the best interest of all people.

We want to improve people’s financial circumstances and that means our data will often result in people being accepted for a new product as we strive for financial inclusion, but sometimes it will result in lenders declining people in the interest of protecting a customer.

Fairness is about building as accurate and complete a picture of consumers as we can; we strive to provide the data that most effectively enables that.

Progressive:

Championing responsible lending through continuous innovation.

Acting with integrity in all aspects of the business, from data collection to reporting, and adhering to the highest ethical standards.

We embrace modern thinking, approaches, and technology to deliver change.

Inclusive:

We are transparent and respectful in how we challenge each other and make decisions.

We contribute to, challenge, and understand our mission and how we achieve this.

We will reflect on, be honest about, and learn from our issues and challenges, without blame.

Ambitious:

Small teams can achieve great things.

We can achieve our mission with focus and execution. The focus that we apply leads to building great products that add value and do not extend beyond their remit.

Complaints Handling Process

In our mission to serve the retail customer market and lenders we take complaints seriously.

We seek to handle complaints quickly and resolve any issues you might have directly with you.

If we cannot resolve your complaint you have a variety of options depending on the nature of your complaint.

You can contact Infact to complain using any of the following methods:

1. Using the details here
2. Email us at: complaints@infactsystems.com
3. Send a letter to: Infact Systems, Office 4.11, 27-31 Clerkenwell Close, London, EC1R 0AT

To help us address your complaint quickly it would be really helpful if you provided the following information:

• Your full name and home address
• If you have a phone number and email address that we can contact you on please do share that as well?
• Please can you also describe the reason for your complaint and what happened as a result?

Once we have received your complaint we will acknowledge receipt within 24 working hours. If we need more information we will also try to ask for it in this communication.

If we can resolve the complaint within 3 working days we will do so, if we can't we will communicate with you accordingly.

If it takes longer then after 4 weeks we will contact you with an update to our investigation.

If it takes longer than that we will aim to resolve it within 8 weeks and share our outcomes with you directly within that time frame.

If you are still not happy with our decision relating to the complaint then you have further options depending on the nature of your complaint to follow a dispute resolution process. We will provide you with your options during the course of our communications with you. For example if you are a consumer and your complaint is related to your Infact Systems Credit Report you can contact the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS).

The Financial Ombudsman Service:

You can contact the FOS for free on 0800 0234 567 from within the UK, or +44207 9640500 from outside the UK, by email at complaint.info@financial-ombudsman.org.uk, online at www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk, or in writing to The Financial Ombudsman Service, Exchange Tower, London, E14 9SR

If your complaint is related to something else and you are unhappy with the outcome of our investigation you can also complaint to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) who are the supervisory authority that regulates handling of personal data in the UK.

The Information Commissioner's Office

You can contact the ICO through their website at https://ico.org.uk/, or by phone on 0303 123 1113.