Paul Randall, the CEO at Creditinfo Group, wrote a very astute blog posting recently, Financial Inclusion Cannot Be Achieved by Public Credit Registries Alone.  Creditinfo, based in Iceland, is a leading service provider for credit information and risk management solutions, running more than 25 credit bureaus on four continents.

In his blog, Randall looked at the proposal for a U.S. government-run credit bureau and observed that “the problem with this administration’s well-intentioned proposal is that it does not solve any of the issues that it is trying to fix, it just centralises them.”  Randall adds that “we also know all too well that the leadership of federal institutions can be volatile, especially when we transition between administrations and governing parties change. A [government-run credit bureau] would therefore likely be exposed to political bias – the kind of bias that private credit bureaus have worked hard to eradicate.”