Verification note — 10 September 2026: The three penalty reports below remain in our archive, but we could not independently retrieve all three RBI releases in this audit. Their quoted wording and amounts remain under re-verification. This is not a newly verified report. The compensation framework is a separate source and has its own eligibility and exclusions.
What changed
On 4 September 2026 the Reserve Bank published three penalty orders, all dated 31 August, against India's credit bureaus:
| Credit information company | Penalty |
|---|---|
| TransUnion CIBIL Limited | ₹26,82,800 |
| CRIF High Mark Credit Information Services | ₹6,89,600 |
| Equifax Credit Information Services | ₹1,19,400 |
All three are penalised for the same failure, in RBI's identical wording: "The company failed to credit the compensation amount to the bank accounts of certain eligible complainants, within the prescribed period." Each order follows a statutory inspection with reference to the company's position as on 31 March 2025. Experian was not among the entities penalised.
Who is affected
Anyone who has ever disputed something on their credit report — which is the mechanism behind every CIBIL score our guides discuss, and behind the score every issuer on this site checks before approving you.
No card's terms change. There is no fee, rate, cap or benefit anywhere in our database that moves because of this.
What it establishes is that the compensation rule is enforced, and that is worth knowing because most people do not know the rule exists.
What to do
Know what you are owed. Under RBI's 2023 framework, if a complaint to correct your credit information is not resolved within 30 calendar days, eligible complainants can receive ₹100 for every day it remains unresolved under that framework, subject to its scope and exclusions. The clock is split: the credit institution that reported the data gets 21 days, and the bureau gets the remaining nine.
The clause these three broke is the one that matters to you after you win: "The compensation amount shall be credited to the bank account of the complainant within five (5) working days of the resolution of the complaint." Being told you are owed money is not the same as receiving it, and the RBI has now fined three companies precisely for that gap.
So if you have a correction outstanding, date it. Past 30 days it is worth ₹100 a day, and if the compensation does not reach your bank account within five working days of resolution, you can escalate to the RBI Ombudsman under the Integrated Ombudsman Scheme, 2021. A wrong entry on your report is worth removing on its own merits — it is what stands between you and the cards in our rankings — but the delay is separately compensable, and now demonstrably enforced.
Sources
- RBI — monetary penalty on TransUnion CIBIL Limited — press release 2026-2027/1042, dated 4 September 2026
- RBI — monetary penalty on CRIF High Mark — press release 2026-2027/1043, dated 4 September 2026
- RBI — monetary penalty on Equifax — press release 2026-2027/1045, dated 4 September 2026
- RBI — Framework for compensation to customers for delayed updation/rectification of credit information — RBI/2023-24/72, 26 October 2023, the ₹100-a-day entitlement and the five-working-day payment clause