James is an energetic young entrepreneur who set up his own recruitment consultancy a year ago. He and his business partner pay themselves a small dividend each month. The company is beginning to make money - he employs five staff – but it’s still early days and income is struggling to keep up with overheads. Suddenly, he urgently needs funds: his car requires a major repair and the business will suffer unless he has wheels to attend meetings with prospective clients.

If he applies for a bank loan, he fears he’ll be turned down. And he’s right to be worried. Banks, and it has to be said, most peer-to-peer lender platforms, routinely approach credit reference agencies like Experian. Here’s what happens when a lender asks for a credit report on an applicant.

Credit reference agencies don’t decide who gets credit – that’s ultimately down to the lender. But the information they supply will help the lender decide. And it’s pretty intrusive stuff: credit reference agencies mine a lot of data, including bankruptcies, electoral register details, court judgments and previous and current credit commitments. They then keep a record of who looks at an applicant’s credit report. Although that’s to allow applicants to know who looked at their report, and when and why, the record constitutes a “footprint” (or “previous search”) which stays on the report for up to two years.

It might surprise people to know that their credit report can be searched without their permission. Simply applying for credit entitles the lender to assess your creditworthiness via a credit report (they’re called “credit-application searches”). Even if you ask only for a price quotation, lenders can look at your report before they calculate one. Searches also occur if you apply for another financial product – organisations use credit reports to verify your identity.

Lenders, to put it bluntly, are on the lookout for patterns contained in your credit history (along with other information) that indicate high risk. A typical pattern is a cluster of credit applications made by the same individual over a relatively short period: this suggests that the individual concerned may be trying to obtain more credit than they can feasibly afford. Your credit rating may suffer as a consequence.

So, back to James. He found out about Unbolted while he was researching borrowing options and he liked what he saw. We place a premium on our customers’ privacy. We don’t perform credit checks, and we don’t report any failure to repay. Ever. And we don’t go into affordability calculations. That’s because creditworthiness is irrelevant to out lenders: our secured asset loans are made on the basis of the resale value of a financially precious possession owned by the customer. In James’ case, he was the proud owner of a near-mint condition Omega Seamaster 300M watch. Once he’d uploaded a photograph of the watch and sent the item to us using our next-day courier service, we were able to establish its resale value and offer him the loan he needed to get his car back.

Six months later, he’d repaid his loan and had his beloved watch (which we’d stored securely and safely) returned to him, too. If you’ve got a valuable asset, Unbolted can probably help you. And we won’t invade your privacy or damage your credit rating.