How to use Alternate Dispute Resolution (ADR) to dispute Lenders and CRBs
Sometimes you may be blacklisted by CRBs in Kenya wrongly. This may have impacts like, you as a customer will get locked out of borrowing from microfinance institutions, commercial banks and other financial institutions. The following will answer how you as the affected customer can dispute the associated lenders easily and less expensively.
The common way is by filing a case at a court of law against the lenders who have wrongly blacklisted you. This process is way too expensive and may take years to conclude. Hence the Constitution of Kenya 2010 introduced the use of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) forms to access justice quickly, easily and cheaply. This is why the Credit Information Sharing (CIS) formed Tatua Centre, a Constitutional recognized form of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR).
Tatua Centre is located at the Kenya School of Monetary Studies (KSMS) and it mediates issues between loan providers like MFIs, banks and people who have been adversely listed by CRBs. The Centre however, does not cover all the complaints from customers adversely affected by CRB listing. Tatua Centre caters for disputes associated with information about a credit consumer stored by CRBs that is inaccurate, outdated and erroneous.
To start the process of using CIS-ADR dispute resolution criteria, you can visit Tatua Center Website or call 020 8646267/2652308.
The first step whenever you get an erroneous report is to lodge a complaint with the relevant CRB in writing. The report may indicate that you owe a certain lender some money while you may have cleared it. It could be because you paid it past the due date. Within five days, the CRB should attach a note on your report and request the accurate data from the lender. The CRB should then investigate and respond to the lender within fourteen days with a notice of resolution, advising whether the disputed information is to be deleted, corrected or remain unchanged.
If the investigations show that an error was made, then the CRB should remedy it and inform all the people affected by the erroneous information. If the CRB is unable to complete the investigation within 21 days, then it is supposed to delete the disputed information as requested by you and if it completes later, it may reinsert or revise the disputed information.
Whenever the notice of resolution recommends a change on the credit report, the CRB is supposed to send a notice of change to all its subscribers who may have obtained your credit information in the previous twelve months, within 5 days. However, should you request a CRB investigation in regards to your credit report and then you turn out to be wrong the CRB charges you.
After these initiatives fail to bear satisfactory outcome, then you proceed to seek help from Tatua Center. In here the credit report disputes are usually resolved within a few days. Tatua Center’s services are free to the credit consumers.
