Credit Reporting Statement

What this document is

A Credit Reporting Statement explains how credit-related information about you is handled by the people arranging your finance. It is a disclosure document, not a contract and not marketing. Its job is to make an ordinarily invisible process visible to you before you take part in it.

The Finance Team is a trading name of Online Showroom Pty Ltd, which holds Australian Credit Licence 551493. We are a broker rather than a lender, so we do not hold the credit account itself. We do handle information about you on the way to and from lenders, and this statement covers what we do with it.

Credit reporting bodies, briefly

A credit reporting body is an organisation that collects credit-related information about consumers and makes it available, under strict legal conditions, to credit providers who are entitled to see it. The system is regulated by the Privacy Act and its Credit Reporting Code, which set out who may contribute information, who may receive it, and for what purposes.

The practical effect is that your dealings with credit are not held only by the individual business you dealt with. Some of it is reported into a shared system that other credit providers can draw on when assessing an application.

Information disclosed and obtained

Two directions matter here. Information may be disclosed to a credit reporting body in connection with your credit, and information may be obtained from one when an application is being assessed. The statement describes both, including the general categories of information involved and the circumstances in which each disclosure or request can happen.

It also covers consent. There are things that cannot be done without your agreement, and the statement explains where your permission is sought and what you are agreeing to when you give it. If you would rather not agree to something, say so — it is better to have that conversation early than to discover the issue partway through an application.

Your rights

The rights are the part worth reading carefully, because they are useful and most people never use them:

• Access. You can request the credit-related information held about you and be told what it contains.
• Correction. If something in that information is wrong, out of date, incomplete or misleading, you can ask for it to be corrected, and there is a defined process for dealing with the request.
• Complaints. If you are unhappy with how your information has been handled, you can complain. The statement sets out how to raise it with us and where you can take it if we do not resolve it to your satisfaction.
• Notification. The statement explains the situations in which you are told that information about you has been disclosed or requested.

None of these cost you anything to exercise. If you are not sure which one applies to your situation, call us and describe what happened.

Reading the statement

This page is a plain-English summary. The specifics — the bodies involved, the categories of information, the timeframes and the exact steps for each right — are set out in the statement itself, and it is the document you should rely on. It opens in a new tab and you do not need to give us anything to read it.

Open the Credit Reporting Statement (PDF)

Related documents: our Credit Guide explains who we are and how we are paid, and our Privacy Statement covers personal information more broadly.