Wollit is a credit building service that aims to help improve your credit history by reporting your monthly plan payments to the UK’s 3 major credit reference agencies (CRAs).
What is Wollit?
Wollit aims to help its customers increase their credit score. Users sign up to Wollit on credit building plans that start from £7.99 per month, and Wollit then reports this credit agreement and the monthly payments to the UK’s 3 main credit reference agencies – Experian, Equifax and Transunion. Wollit also has an add-on tool where monthly rental payments can be reported to the 3 CRAs too.
Having on-time monthly payments like these recorded on a credit report can help boost a person’s credit score in the long run.
The idea is that in the future, an improved credit score will make a person more likely to be approved for financial products like credit cards, loans or mortgages, and also be eligible for better interest rates.
How does Wollit work?
You can sign up to Wollit via its app, which the company says only takes 2 minutes.
You’ll be signing up to a 12-month plan that you buy on credit and pay off in 12 monthly payments. Once you’ve chosen a credit building plan (which start at £7.99 per month), you’ll enter into an interest-free loan agreement with Wollit to cover the total cost of it.
Wollit reports this agreement and the monthly payments to Experian, Equifax and Transunion. This can help you build a positive credit history, which is a crucial factor affecting your credit score.
Wollit can’t guarantee that a user’s credit score will definitely improve, as factors such as a person’s other financial behaviour will affect it.
But if a user is sensible with their overall finances, makes their monthly Wollit payments and pays all their other bills on time, then Wollit says some of its customers will see an increase in their credit score within a few months, while others will see a positive difference at the end of their 12-month plan.
How much does Wollit cost?
Wollit offers 3 credit building plans:
- Wollit Essentials Plan: £7.99 per month (£95.88 for the year)
- Wollit Plus Plan: £9.99 per month (£119.88 for the year), which includes the Rent Reporting tool
- Wollit Premium Plan: £19.99 per month (£239.88 for the year), which includes the Rent Reporting tool and personalised support from a credit coach
Am I eligible for Wollit?
Wollit says there are no eligibility requirements and there is no credit check when signing up.
Wollit is most suitable for people looking to build credit, especially if they have a poor credit history, or haven’t had much credit in the past, so they haven’t had the opportunity to build up their credit file and prove their financial reliability.
What is the Rent Reporting tool?
Wollit’s Rent Reporting tool will report your monthly rental payments to the 3 CRAs. The aim of this is to help boost your credit score, as paying your monthly rent on time shows you are financially responsible and can meet your monthly bill commitments.
Wollit will ask permission to look at your personal current account using Open Banking technology, to detect your rent payment and report that you’ve made it to the CRAs. This connection to your bank account will be read-only – Wollit will only be able to see your transactions, they can’t do anything else to your bank account.
The Rent Reporting tool is only available on Wollit’s Plus and Premium Plans.
Is Wollit safe?
Wollit Ltd was founded in 2019 and is a company registered in England and Wales. But its credit building service plans are classed as “exempt credit agreements”, which are unregulated in the UK. This means that users don’t have the protections that typically come with a financial product that is regulated by the Consumer Credit Act.
If you give permission for Wollit to have read-only access to your personal bank account, so that it can see your rent payments for the Rent Reporting tool, then Wollit uses a company called TrueLayer to manage this. TrueLayer Ltd is also a company that’s registered in England and Wales, plus it’s authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.
What are the pros and cons of Wollit?
Pros
- No credit check when signing up.
- No eligibility requirements to meet.
- Could help improve your credit score.
- Access to a Rent Reporting tool.
Cons
- Monthly plan fee.
- Extra cost for the Rent Reporting tool.
- This type of credit agreement is unregulated.
Our verdict: is Wollit any good?
Wollit joins the likes of Loqbox in the credit building services market, where people can make comparatively small monthly payments that get recorded on their credit file and can ultimately help boost their credit score.
With Loqbox, the money you pay them on a monthly basis actually goes into a “savings locker” that you can access at the end (albeit sometimes with a one-off fee). But with Wollit you don’t get back the money you pay for the plan on a monthly basis.
Wollit can’t guarantee your credit score will go up, but by meeting the monthly Wollit repayments and being responsible with your finances elsewhere, it is likely to improve.
As there are no eligibility checks, Wollit’s service could particularly help you if you need to build credit because of a poor credit history or because you have no credit history in the UK.
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