The UAE’s Al Etihad Credit Bureau (AECB) held its first Annual Al Etihad Credit Bureau Subscriber Forum on Monday, 13 June, at the JW Marriott Marquis Hotel in Dubai. The forum included 59 subscribers with senior representatives from the risk and retail divisions of financial institutions in the UAE. The event established a deeper level of engagement with all credit providers, offered a platform to discuss operational improvements and outlined upcoming product and data developments for the remainder of the year.

Marwan Ahmad Lutfi, CEO of Al Etihad Credit Bureau, opened the forum with a recap of the key milestones in the entity’s journey since its inception. He said, “The number of Subscribers with Al Etihad Credit Bureau had doubled in 2015 to reach a total of 59 whilst the average monthly enquiries had tripled in Q4 2015 compared to Q1 of the same year”.

Lutfi also stressed the importance of strengthening communication, collaboration and knowledge exchange among subscribers and with the Bureau in order to ensure that the industry benefits from one common credit-reporting platform that not only solidifies risk and lending practices in the industry but also positively affects the financial and economic sector of the UAE.

Lutfi noted that, “In more than 18 months of operations, with over 6.6 million active facilities in the AECB database, only 1,880 disputes were raised which account for less than 0.0005 per cent of all facilities in the database; 90 per cent of disputes were resolved in 10 working days. However, in our drive towards excellence, we have also developed an online data correction tool for our data providers that will enable them to make real-time data corrections. This will considerably further reduce dispute turnaround times and significantly increase the accuracy of data submissions.”

Al Etihad Credit Bureau also recognized a number of financial institutions for their significant role in contributing to the Bureau’s success to-date. Among the awards were:

• First successful data submission awarded to Sharjah Islamic Bank
• First consumer report enquiry awarded to National Bank of Fujairah
• First commercial report Enquiry awarded to Aafaq
• First alert usage awarded to Standard Chartered Bank
• First bulk portfolio monitoring awarded to Citibank
• First Application-to-Application (A2A) enquiry awarded to Mashreq

by Robin Amlôt