Equifax: Frozen Credit Detection & Status Display

Posted 2 days ago by Kelly Chen

K
Kelly Chen Admin

Date Available: Beta 7/17, Prod 7/21


Which customers are impacted?: Lenders using Equifax as their credit provider and opt in.


Required?: No, opt-in.


How to turn on: This will not be automatically enabled for our customers. It will be available beginning on the dates listed above. If you’d like to take advantage of this functionality, please email support@blend.com.


Purpose of Update and Benefit: When a credit pull against Equifax returns a frozen or unavailable bureau, loan officers currently see a generic error message with no indication of which bureau is affected. This can lead to frozen bureaus being incorrectly treated as service failures, triggering Adverse Action Notices and requiring loan officers to contact Equifax support directly to retrieve frozen-bureau documents.


This update introduces per-bureau freeze detection and clear status display, so loan officers can immediately identify which bureaus are frozen or unavailable and take action, rather than discovering issues downstream in underwriting.


Current Behavior: When a credit pull returns a frozen or unavailable bureau, the loan officer sees a generic message ("CREDIT FROZEN FOR ONE OR MORE REQUESTED VENDORS") with no breakdown of which bureaus are affected.


No credit report PDF is automatically captured. If Equifax returns a PDF as part of a freeze or error response, loan officers must contact Equifax support directly to retrieve it.


New Behavior: When enabled, loan officers see a per-bureau status breakdown after a credit pull, showing whether each bureau (Equifax, Experian, TransUnion) returned data, has a security freeze on file, or is temporarily unavailable. This replaces the generic error message.


Status labels displayed to the loan officer:

  • Report returned: credit data was successfully returned by the bureau.

  • Security freeze on file: a security freeze was detected for this bureau.

  • Bureau temporarily unavailable: the bureau returned an error or was unreachable.

 


When Equifax returns a credit report PDF as part of a freeze or error response, the document is automatically captured and stored in the loan's document tab. Loan officers no longer need to contact Equifax support to retrieve it.


If a borrower's SSN does not match Equifax records, an inline error message is displayed to the loan officer at the time of the credit pull rather than surfacing later.


If all bureaus are frozen or unavailable, a warning message is displayed to the loan officer indicating that no credit data was returned.

 


Note: This phase includes status display only. The ability to retry a credit pull or drop a specific bureau will be available in a future release.


This feature applies to Equifax/EMS credit pulls only. Other credit providers are not affected.


There are no changes to the borrower-facing experience in this release.

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