An average of 2,114,636 enquiries were conducted by financial institutions and authorised users monthly, data from the Bank of Ghana has revealed.

This resulted in an increase of 46.5% compared to 1,443,000 average monthly enquiries in 2022.

These increases, the Central Bank, said also demonstrate the level of acceptance of credit reports in the credit management processes among all types of institutions.

Meanwhile, searches or enquiries on the database of credit bureaus increased by 46.5% from 9,379,499 searches to a total number of 13,745,137 in 2023.

These searches were conducted by financial institutions and other authorised users of the Credit Reporting System.

This significant increase was a result of the integration of credit reports in the provision of digital loans by respective lenders.

Also, searches conducted on credit bureau databases by authorised users could result in a “Hit” or “No Hit”.

A Hit search means that searches returned some information on persons or institutions being searched upon.

The returned information could be only demographic or both demographic and financial information. In 2023, 72.0% of searches conducted returned a hit compared to 85.0% in 2022.

This reduction was however expected due to the high number of searches relating to digital loan applications. This was partly because some digital loan applicants who were searched by lenders were first-time borrowers resulting in 2,465,396 “No Hit” searches out of the total 3,863,537 “No Hit” searches. This represents 64.0 percent of total “No Hit" searches.