The credit file updates monthly while money moves in real time. Agencies are now bolting live bank data on top of it, but the file itself still lags
Payments now settle in seconds, but it can take weeks for a credit file to reflect them. The agencies behind those files only know what lenders report, and lenders report on a monthly cycle, so a debt you clear today can stay on your file while the next lender who checks sees a balance you no longer owe.
The lag is why real-time bank data is working its way into lending, and even into the credit file itself. The file still updates monthly, but less and less of a lending decision waits for it.
Some lenders skip the file entirely
In the UK, a growing number of lenders no longer wait for the file, opting instead to read an applicant’s bank transactions directly through open banking and lending on what the account shows on the day.
According to Open Banking Limited, Salad, a Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)-regulated community development finance institution, has lent £164m to more than 112,000 customers this way, with loans of £500 to £2,000. Plend, which runs the same kind of check, reports average borrower savings of around £2,077 against mainstream alternatives and says most of its customers would otherwise be turned away.
The FCA has encouraged the approach, asking lenders in its 2026 consumer finance priorities to consider whether open banking data could improve decisions for people with thin credit files, while the Consumer Duty already requires firms to lend on what a borrower can currently afford.
Open banking has its own limit, though. Each check needs the borrower’s consent at the point of application and leaves no standing record, so for mortgages and most large lending the agencies still hold the file lenders rely on.
Agencies have not stood still either, with Equifax‘s Affordability 360 blending bureau data with live open banking transactions, a mix it says lifts approvals for lower-affordability applicants by 29%. Experian lets consumers feed their own bank-account payments into their Experian file through open banking, and TransUnion sells credit data and open banking affordability checks side-by-side.
The regulator’s overhaul stops short of speed
The core file underneath is being rebuilt too, though not for speed. The FCA’s CP26/7 consultation, drawn from its Credit Information Market Study which closed on 1 May 2026, would force any firm sharing consumer credit data with one agency to share it with all of them, so the answer a lender gets no longer turns on which agency it checks. A further remedy tightens the accuracy obligations on the firms supplying the data.
“Access to affordable credit relies on good-quality data – it’s vital in helping consumers navigate their financial lives,” said Alison Walters, Director of Consumer Finance at the FCA, when the proposals were published. “That’s why we want to make sure everyone’s credit information is as full and accurate as possible.”
An industry-led Credit Information Governance Body now oversees the work, and any rules would take effect 12 months after the FCA publishes a policy statement. The overhaul makes the file fuller and more consistent, but it does nothing about how often the file updates, so a cleared debt will still sit there for weeks.
Why is live data not built into the core file?
So while the file and real-time data are already meeting, they do so as separate products lenders buy and bolt on one decision at a time. The file underneath still updates once a month.
Building the live data into the core file would close the lag for good – though it has not happened – partly because the two run on different terms.
The file is a permanent shared record every lender can draw on, while open banking access is granted by the borrower for a single check, so feeding one-off consented data into a standing record raises a consent problem the rules haven’t yet resolved.
Borrowers also have to share their bank access themselves, and only around a third of UK adults (15 million) use open banking at all, so a file fed partly by live data would cover some people and miss others. What’s more, raw bank transactions would have to be sorted into the structured entries a credit file is built from.
And nothing compels agencies to do this. They already sell the combined data as a paid affordability product, so there is little commercial pull to build it into the base file lenders buy as standard.
This is why the real-time view for credit files still sits behind a monthly lag for consumers, and each lender still decides when to look at someone’s file.
