Pan-Arab credit bureau a possibility

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Watson: BENEFIT can now drop a turnkey credit bureau solution into any country.

A senior figure at a GCC financial services provider has said that it is inevitable that a credit bureau covering all Arab countries will be established.

Robin Watson, assistant general manager of the Bahrain credit reference bureau which is operated by The BENEFIT Company said: "I think there will be a pan-Arab bureau at some point in time. It's visionary but it has to happen. Governors would be very excited about it."

BENEFIT is the first to design and establish a credit bureau operation purely for the Arab market and is accepted in the banking community with 24 Bahrain banks subscribing to the service. It is currently in discussions with several Arab countries to assist in the launch of their credit bureau services.

The company is able to offer ready-made bureau solutions. A new bureau could be in operation in another country while BENEFIT develop and test other risk management products and services such as Global FICO Score, Risk Alerts, Segmentation and Fraud Detection. This would allow new bureaus to adopt new products much quicker than developing them from scratch.

Watson said: "We've gone through the pain of setting it up. Why does a new country have to go through this? Our product is tried and testing and accepted by some of the big names in banking".

"We can drop a turnkey operation into a country in a very short period of time. We are able to roll this out very quickly, from evaluation to full operation. This would allow the credit bureau operator to demonstrate the functionality of a bureau while taking care of the infrastructure and legislation which is extremely important to the success and efficiency of such a business." Running many countries' credit bureaus on the same platform would also mean that systems were inter-operable, allowing cross-border data sharing in the event that a bureau for multiple countries was established.

However, Watson warned that any countries establishing a credit bureau would need to put regulatory guidelines in place and be aware of data-sharing laws before they began operations.

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