The three-digit score is a summary; the report is the evidence. Lenders read the report, and once you can too, you will know exactly what any underwriter will see before they see it.
Section by section
Personal information. Name, date of birth, PAN, addresses, phone numbers. Boring — and the first place fragmentation shows. Multiple spellings of your name or an address you never lived at can mean parts of your history sit in another file.
Account information — the heart of the report. Every loan and card, each showing the lender, type, ownership (individual/joint/guarantor), sanctioned amount or limit, current balance, and status. The statuses that matter:
- Active / Closed — normal life cycle
- Settled — you paid less than owed; a serious negative for years
- Written off — the lender gave up collecting; the worst ordinary flag
- Suit filed / Wilful default — litigation flags; effectively no mainstream credit until resolved
The DPD grid. For each account, a month-by-month string of "days past due" for up to 36 months. 000 or STD means paid on time; 030 means a payment 30 days late that month; SUB, DBT and LSS are escalating bad-asset classifications. Lenders scan this grid first — a clean string of zeros is what "good history" literally looks like.
Enquiry information. Every hard enquiry: which lender, which product, what date. A cluster of recent enquiries reads as credit hunger, and lenders see the products you were shopping for.
The red flags, in the order lenders spot them
- Anything other than zeros in the recent DPD months
- "Settled" or "written off" anywhere in the account list
- High utilisation on revolving accounts
- An enquiry cluster in the last 90 days
- Total obligations high relative to declared income
What to do with what you find
Wrong data → dispute it. High utilisation → the fastest fix in the improvement guide. A genuinely messy history → six clean months before your next application beats any amount of explaining. And pull your report at least annually even when nothing is wrong — fraud on your PAN is found in this document or not at all.
Frequently asked questions
Days Past Due — how late that month's payment was, reported month by month per account. 000 or STD is on time; 030/060/090 are 30/60/90 days late; SUB, DBT and LSS are progressively worse asset classifications. Lenders read this grid before anything else.
"Closed" means fully repaid — neutral to positive. "Settled" means the lender accepted less than the full dues and remains a strong negative for years. If you clear the shortfall later, get the status upgraded to closed in writing and verify it on the report.
Account history, including negative flags, is typically visible for up to seven to eight years, with the most recent 36 months of DPD shown in the grid. Recent conduct is weighted far more heavily, so damage fades in practice well before it disappears in print.
Either a lender ran a review on an existing relationship, a co-application listed you, or it is unauthorised. If you cannot trace it, dispute it — unauthorised enquiries are also a fraud early-warning.