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Schufa office in Berlin
Photo:
Jens Kalaene / dpa
With a service called CheckNow, Schufa also wants to evaluate account statements in the future, reports NDR, WDR and »Süddeutsche Zeitung« (SZ).
The aim is therefore to give people with a bad Schufa score a chance of a better rating.
For example, this is often a prerequisite for getting a rental agreement, a mobile phone contract or a loan.
CheckNow requires the consent of the customer.
The service is currently being tested together with the mobile operator O2.
According to NDR, the credit agency, which claims to have data on 67.9 million natural persons and six million companies, emphasizes that the new service is earmarked and that only relevant data is viewed and briefly stored.
According to Schufa, no data is stored in the test
According to the SZ, consumers have to tick a box on the mobile operator's website in order to give their permission to view accounts.
This also goes hand in hand with the permission to save the date from bank statements "for twelve months and theoretically develop your own products from them," as the newspaper report says.
In the test run with O2, however, according to Schufa, no data would be stored at all: "The test environment is currently designed in such a way that no data is stored even with the consent of the user."
O2 explained to the NDR: “We are currently only testing the demand and acceptance of the Schufa CheckNow procedure among some of our customers in a pilot project with a small number of less than 100 users.
Participation is voluntary and requires the active consent of the user. «The responsibility for data protection lies with Schufa.
"Supplement to existing scores"
NDR, WDR and SZ report, citing internal Schufa documents, e-mails and presentations, that the credit agency has further plans and “apparently pursues the goal”, as the SZ article says, “to provide detailed insight into millions of bank statements to get.
This knowledge could possibly flow into a kind of superscore. "
The legal basis for this is the second EU Payment Services Directive (PSD2), which came into force in 2019.
It enables so-called account information services to gain insight into accounts, provided that the account holder gives their consent.
With the company finAPI, Schufa has taken over such an account information service.
It has "secure access to currently 58 million end customer accounts," as it was called at the time.
NDR, WDR and SZ quoted from a presentation from March 2019, which dealt with “current product development approaches”, including “new scores” or “supplementing existing scores with additional indicators”.
At an industry event, a finAPI employee also stated that account statements could identify 65 categories, including salary, state benefits, maintenance payments, expenses for home improvement and gardening, but also "risk factors" such as gambling or payments to debt collection agencies.
According to the reports, Schufa is currently only talking about the test phase: »We are currently in a test by Schufa CheckNow.
We are therefore currently unable to provide any information about the later design of the final product. «A data processing of account statements for Schufa's own purposes only takes place» if the consumer - expressly and independently of the actual service - gives separate consent « .
Schufa has not yet responded to a request from SPIEGEL.
The Bavarian State Office for Data Protection Supervision is responsible for checking the CheckNow service for admissibility, because finAPI GmbH is based in Munich, as the authority announced in response to a request from SPIEGEL: »We comprehensively check the basics of data processing by finAPI GmbH.
The exams are still ongoing and there is no end in sight. "
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