“We’re really keen on an August second tranche of pilot users,” CIC President and Chief Executive Officer Jaime P. Garchitorena told BusinessWorld in a recent interview.
The CIC had expressed its interest in giving financial institutions a chance to provide their credit data to the CIC prior to the launch of the database’s nine-month pilot phase last May 8.
A month after it formally rolled out the pilot phase of the country’s centralized credit information system, the government-controlled firmed had recruited four additional financial entities on top of the 100 companies that were able to join and meet CIC’s deadline in submitting their credit data,
Republic Act No. 9510 or the Credit Information System Act mandates the establishment of a comprehensive and centralized credit information system, with CIC tasked to consolidate the data.
The law also states that submitting entities, which are the lenders, are required to submit and provide all credit data of their borrowers in their database to the CIC.
Mr. Garchitorena also said they are currently focusing on getting cooperatives to submit their loan data by end-June due to the sheer size of the sector’s data.
“So what’s significant is that by June the deadline of cooperatives will have arrived and passed. Now what we want to do is to make sure that we have enough IT resources to assist all cooperatives in getting in because they are very significant to the concept of financial inclusion,” he noted.
Asked if these cooperatives will be able to join the testing phase as soon as they submit their data before the month ends, Mr. Garchitorena said only some will be able to use the pilot phase of the database.
“We have to see first because we have [cooperatives] that have been submitting since even when it’s not their deadline. Definitely those that have passed and are ready, we will let through,” he said.
“In the best case scenario, we will have a nice mix of users all the way from cooperatives that may have less robust IT systems or connectivity all the way to the largest banks and it will be an interesting experiment on if there are any overlaps on their clientele so that will be nice to see,” Mr. Garchitorena said.
The country’s centralized credit information system is expected to go live by January 2018. — Janine Marie D. Soliman