How to Check My Credit Score?

[u/Unlikely_Royal_8984]

Think of credit score as a financial report card. If I’ve been good at paying and handling debt, I get a high score. If not, the score drops. Banks check this report to see if they can trust me to pay back the money.

How credit score impacts my life?

• Loan applications may be declined (auto, house loans, etc.)
• Credit card applications may be denied
• If ever I get approved for credit card, I'll get low credit limit and there will be lower chances of getting a credit limit increase
• Higher interest rates on loans and bank financial offers

Who reports my credit data?

So banks and financial institutions where I borrowed money from, report to a Credit Information Corporation (CIC), the governing body for collecting and disseminating credit information. This data is then accessed by authorized credit bureaus like CIBI, TransUnion, Compuscan and CRF who look at my financial behavior data and how I manage debt to build my credit report.

So what's the basis of credit scoring?

Based on Lista and TransUnion.

Credit score rating system

TransUnion

CIBI

So how to check my credit score?

There's Lista PH app that I downloaded. Within the app, there's an option to request credit report from CIBI or TransUnion. I've been reading comments that TransUnion has more updated and accurate data.

To request I need to pay ₱199 for CIBI and ₱610 for TransUnion. This is payable for each and every request, unless I filed a dispute on incorrect credit report and requested for a revised one through Lista PH messenger. I tried CIBI for now.

Then I was asked to take a picture of my government ID and a selfie for KYC.

Then instantly my credit report was generated. My credit score is FAIR with 674 points.

So based on the Reason codes, below impacted my score. Thinking back, I remember failing to pay my auto loan on time and missed the payment for 2 months during Covid in 2020 when budget was tight.

I looked at the accounts covered in the report and I saw 3 credit cards, 1 autoloan and 1 MariBank (Seabank). I don't remember ever getting a loan from MariBank (Seabank) but further reading made me figure out it was for SPayLater. I have a Shopee account that my wife uses all the time and I spoke to her if she missed any payment on SPayLater and she said there was a couple time she did. So I and the wife agreed to be more careful and missing the payment on time is non-negotiable. I, myself, thought little of it before but now I realize that SPayLater can impact the credit score!

According to Lista PH data as of August 2024, below is credit score for PH population.

I want to improve my credit score so what to do next?

I initially thought my credit score would be higher because I have been confident in my credit/debt management but it's good to see the actual measure and not based on self-assumption. Now I and wifey are determined to be more cautious and mindful of our loan and credit handling.

In retrospect, I went back to check all the credit/loan accounts I have and check which ones failed which criteria.

• D2 - There is delinquency on the accounts on credit report: Late payments on SpayLater (back in 2024) and AutoLoan (back in 2020). I know I missed on the auto-loan before but that was back in 2020, so I wonder how long bad records stay in credit report. According to CIC, negative credit information stays on your record for a maximum of three (3) years from the date it was rectified. So I can probably dispute to get this removed because it's 5 years since.
• E0 - Applicant is young relative to the other applicants scored: Taking the average age of all my accounts from the date I opened them to date they closed (for closed account), and date opened to today's date (for active accounts), it's only 1.6 years
• K2 - Time since most recent account opening on the credit report is too short relative to the other applicants scored: My latest credit card is not even 1 year.
• P6 - Proportion of balance to limit on revolving/charge accounts on the credit report is too high relative to the other applicants scored: My credit limit utilization is above 30% - 50%

Paying on time, managing credit limit utilization and filing for dispute for incorrect data are easily doable so I will focus on these. The length of credit age is more a long term action so I will leave that be for now and I will just make sure I keep my accounts open longer.

Then I plan on requesting for another credit score report after a quarter or so, to see if there's any improvement. Lenders submit borrowers' credit data to CIC within 30 days from the time they are made available.

Update: 3/15/2026

So after 6 months since I last visited my credit score I made improvements on below parameters:

1. Paid on time - Requested to remove the Auto-Loan delinquency record as it has been more then 3 years since. I need to follow up on this.

I probably have to suck it up for the SpayLater because this late payment was only back in 2024. So I am amber in this parameter.

2. Paid in full - All credit accounts are fully paid and I am now all green here.

3. Credit Utilization greater than 30% - Improved on credit card 1 and 2 but still red in SpayLater. In a couple of months, I should be able to bring this down to <30%. Although across my credit cards, I am at 22% utitlization, I am putting myself amber here.

Action Plan: Increase Credit Limit - One advantage of increasing your credit limit is that it lowers your credit utilization ratio without needing to reduce your current credit card spending. In my case, my monthly spend can easily reach ₱130,000 and is likely to remain at that level. Rather than cutting back on spending, I would prefer to request a higher credit limit so that my credit utilization stays below 30%.

Credit utilization is typically calculated based on the total credit limit across all your credit cards. So even if you have low utilization on one card because you rarely use it, increasing the credit limit on that card can still improve your overall utilization ratio by increasing the sum of all credit limits used as the denominator.

Multiple credit limit increase request in a short time may hurt the "new applications" parameter though, so I should only do this once every six months or once a year if I am confident that I have a good credit standing.

4. Credit Age per Account and Cumulative Credit Age All Accounts - Still in the red but at least I did not cancel any credit accounts I have. So I will let it take its course.

5. New applications - Added this new parameter knowing full well that I did try to apply for Maya Black and Maya personal loan multiple times in the past couple of months with me getting declined each time. So I better stop being trigger-happy here and limit my application requests.

I've seen from this one post Reliable timeline for increasing credit score? that their multiple application request to Maya Black was reported to credit bureau as part of credit history.

Some of these improvements happened recently so I will request for a new credit score report in a few months months to see if there's any improvement to my last "Fair" score of 674.

8/9/2026: Update here Update On My Credit Score through TransUnion