Central Credit Reference Information System, popularly known as CCRIS is a system that collects credit records of individuals and/or organizations from financial institutions and makes it available to the borrowers. It is simply a reference for the Lending institution when deciding whether to approve or reject loan applications. You will encounter this if you had applied for any
personal loan,
mortgage loan or
business loan from commercial banks. There is no CCRIS blacklist check as many people perceive, it is just a credit record database available to the lenders and even the borrowers. To prevent abuse of the system by the borrowers, the number of times one can update his/her CCRIS records is capped at once every 3 months
Bank Negara Malaysia has the mandate to regulate the country’s banks and other financial institutions and ensure the credibility of the banking system. One of the many ways it does this is by coming up and promoting credible credit policies and also instilling ethics and professionalism to the banking industry. This includes to some extent having ethical approach to credit risk management. Bank Negara Malaysia thus developed CCRIS and made it available to all financial institutions to enable them to make the best and most informed decisions within a short time before giving credit. This goes a long way in aiding the financial institutions to avoid bad debts which usually result in big losses.
There are several ways to access your CCRIS report, the main one being visiting one of the Bank Negara Malaysia headquarters or make a request to have your report mailed or faxed to you, which normally takes between 2 and 4 weeks. The report is delivered to the financial institution nearest to you where you can go pick it. It is not yet possible to check CCRIS online as of today but one can do it via email by sending your email address to Bank Negara’s number. Note that it will cost you a few RMs.