Metro 2 Credit Reporting for Payday & Short-Term Lenders
Report single-payment and deferred-deposit advances to the credit bureaus. Built for the shortest tenors in consumer lending, where a loan can open and close inside one reporting cycle.
Challenges for Payday & Short-Term Lenders
A loan can open and close inside one cycle
When the tenor is shorter than the reporting interval, the account's entire life happens between two monthly files. Reporting it as though it were a standard installment loan misrepresents it.
Single-payment products resist the format
Metro 2 was designed around multi-payment credit. A single-payment advance has no meaningful payment schedule, which makes terms, frequency, and payment-rating treatment judgment calls rather than lookups.
Rollovers and renewals are easy to misreport
A renewed or refinanced advance is a new account, a continued one, or a modified one depending on structure — and picking wrong creates either duplicate tradelines or a hidden delinquency.
Regulatory scrutiny is higher in this segment
Small-dollar lending draws sustained CFPB and state attention. Furnishing accurately, with documented dispute responses, is part of the compliance posture examiners expect to see.
How the Platform Helps
Built for high-churn books
Bulk import and automated cycle handling designed for portfolios where a large share of accounts open and close every month.
Get the structural decisions right once
We work through how your specific product maps — terms, frequency, payment rating, closure sequencing — and save it as a template that applies to every subsequent cycle.
Validation before the bureau sees it
Errors are caught and explained locally instead of coming back as a reject that costs you a full cycle.
Documented dispute responses
Every reinvestigation is tracked, answered, and recorded with an exportable audit trail for exams.
Features for Payday & Short-Term Lenders
1High-volume batch import
Process thousands of short-tenor accounts per cycle from a single export, with column auto-detection.
2Automated monthly cycle
Scheduled generation and SFTP delivery per bureau, so a fast-moving book does not depend on someone remembering.
3CRA response reconciliation
Bureau response files are parsed automatically and rejections surfaced as actionable corrections.
4Sandbox and test-mode records
Environment-tagged records and test API keys let you validate the whole pipeline before anything goes live.
Who Uses BureauRelay
Storefront and online single-pay lending
State-licensed deferred-deposit and single-payment advance products reporting for the first time.
Transitioning to installment products
Lenders moving from single-pay to installment structures who need both reported correctly during the overlap.
Adding credit building to a small-dollar product
Differentiating on the fact that repayment actually counts for something on the borrower's file.
Compliance & Regulations
FCRA accuracy and reinvestigation duties
Furnisher obligations under §1681s-2 apply in full regardless of loan size or tenor, including 30-day dispute response deadlines.
Complete and accurate reporting
Reporting only delinquent accounts while omitting performing ones is not permitted. Validation enforces the full-portfolio picture.
Examination-ready documentation
Field-level history with SSN redaction and exportable dispute records, for a segment where examinations are routine.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I report a loan that opened and closed in the same month?
It is reported as an account that opened and reached a paid/closed status within the cycle, carrying the correct open date, closure treatment, and payment history for the period. The mechanics matter — done wrong it either never appears at all or appears as an open account that never closes. This is one of the specific things we work through during mapping rather than leaving to a default.
Should a rollover be a new account or the same one?
It depends on whether your product legally originates a new obligation or extends the existing one, and that varies by state and by lender. The distinction drives whether you report a new account number or continue the existing tradeline, and getting it wrong produces either duplicate tradelines or a gap. We work from your actual loan documents rather than assuming.
Do the nationwide bureaus even want this data?
Yes — furnishing small-dollar loans to Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion is standard and supported. There is also a second tier of alternative-data bureaus built specifically around this segment, where non-prime underwriters do much of their querying. We cover the nationwide file today; see our alternative-data page for where the rest stands.
Will this help my borrowers build credit?
An on-time payment history reported to the nationwide bureaus appears on the standard consumer report and is factored by scoring models, which for a thin-file borrower can be materially valuable. That is a real differentiator for your product, and it is worth saying out loud to borrowers at origination.
Related Industries
Report your short-term book correctly
Send a sample export and we will map your product structure, validate it, and hand back a bureau-ready first file.