Credit Building > Which savings accounts can help build credit?

Which savings accounts can help build credit?

Wollit Team3 minute read · Updated 3rd July 2024

There are no credit builder savings accounts in the UK. However, several tools claim to help you make your savings and investments count toward your credit score. Let’s have a look and see how they work.

These tools are:

Experian Boost;
Loqbox Save;
Monese Credit Builder.

Experian Boost

Experian Boost is a free feature offered by Experian that allows people in the UK to instantly improve their Experian credit score by looking at payments for things that typically do not factor into credit scores. One of these payments is regular contributions to investments and savings accounts.

Here is how Experian Boost can help increase your Experian credit score by including data related to your savings and investments:

First, connect your bank and credit card accounts to Experian. This gives Experian access to your payment history. Don’t worry, it’s secure and read-only.
Experian looks at eligible payments made over the past 12 months. Among these are payments made to investments and savings accounts like ISAs and monthly savings accounts.
If you are making these payments regularly, Experian calculates a Boost score and instantly applies it to your Experian credit score.

This works great in theory. It’s free, gives an instant boost to your score, and takes only a few minutes.

In practice, we don’t know how much of an impact Experian Boost has. This is because of two main downsides:

It only affects your Experian credit score. Many lenders look at all your scores, including from Equifax and TransUnion.
Participating lenders can see both your “real” and “boosted” scores. It’s unclear how much they’ll consider your boosted one when making their decisions.

Loqbox Save

Loqbox Save is a tool to help people build their credit history while saving money regularly.

Here is how Loqbox Save works:

Choose an amount to save monthly, from £20 to £200.
Based on this, Loqbox will give you a 0% APR loan for the total yearly amount. This loan is locked away in your Loqbox Save account, preventing you from spending it.
The amount you’re “saving” monthly is accounted for by Loqbox as a repayment for this loan. Loqbox reports these payments to credit agencies like Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion as you make your monthly loan repayments.
Making regular payments on time helps build a positive credit history, which can potentially increase your credit score.
Once the savings goal is reached, Loqbox releases the saved amount into a new bank account with one of their partner banks for free or an existing account for a fee.
Loqbox makes money by earning commissions from the partner banks you choose to move these savings to.

In other words, it’s a bit of a gimmick. You’re not saving money – and not getting credit for savings, either. You’re just locking away a portion of the money and then receiving it at the end without any interest.

Loqbox also has one big downside: it forces customers to choose between opening a new bank account (which might temporarily lower their credit score) or paying a fee of £30 to access their own money.

Monese Credit Builder

The Monese Credit Builder is offered by Monese, a prepaid card company.

The way it works is similar in many ways to Loqbox Save:

You set up a fixed repayment amount that you can afford to pay back each month, between £30 to £100.
Monese then gives you an interest-free credit builder loan for the same amount. This amount is then locked away so you can’t spend it.
As you make repayments each month for a year to pay off the loan, Monese reports these repayments to the three leading credit agencies.
After 12 months of successful repayment history, your Credit Builder pot is unlocked and ready to spend.
In exchange, Monese charges £2.50 per month for 12 months.

This scheme, unfortunately, has the same downsides as Loqbox:

It’s not truly a savings account, so you earn no interest.
You have to pay £30 to access your own money.
You must ensure that you have the right amount available in your Monese account each month. Otherwise, Monese will report a missed payment, potentially lowering your credit score further. Most people use Monese as a backup account since it’s not a licenced bank, which means that having a balance of £0 in their Monese prepaid account is quite likely.

Why don’t regular savings or investment accounts help build credit history in the UK?

Regular savings or investment accounts do not help build credit history in the UK because they are not reported to credit reference agencies like Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion.

They’re not reported because these accounts don’t show how you behave as a borrower, which is what lenders care about when assessing creditworthiness.

To build credit history, you must engage in credit-related activities such as using credit cards, taking out loans, or participating in credit builder programs that report actual debt payment behaviour to credit agencies.

In other words, if you save or invest regularly, great. However, do not expect these to contribute to establishing a credit history with the credit reference agencies in the UK.

For a better way to build credit, consider downloading a credit-building app like Wollit. Wollit works straightforwardly: it reports a fixed monthly subscription fee as a loan repayment to all three credit reference agencies.

This means that, unlike Experian Boost, it also helps build your Equifax and TransUnion credit history. And unlike Loqbox Save and Monese Credit Builder, you don’t need to lock away a portion of your money to build credit. You simply pay a small fixed fee for building credit – and keep your credit building and savings separate.