How to Read an AECB Report: A Lender's Guide to Individual and Company Files

Read an Al Etihad Credit Bureau report in a fixed order: identity block, then score, then the credit-contract summary, then facility-level detail, then cheque returns and court obligations. On an owner-managed UAE SME you read two reports — the company file and the owner's individual file — and the credit decision lives in the gap between them.

Key facts

• YuSight extracts bureau and financial data at 95.2% accuracy, validated against a manual benchmark, and maps each extracted facility to the right borrower entity in a multi-licence group — which is the step that fails when an analyst reads a company report and an individual report as two unrelated documents.
• A report covers 36 months. The UAE Government portal describes the report as containing the credit score, "payment history — it is a record of your loan and bill payments for the last 36 months," a summary of credit contracts, an income utilisation ratio and court obligations, with data "collected from banks, financial companies, telecom and utility providers, courts and government entities" (u.ae, *Credit report of individuals and companies*).
• The two reports are obtained differently. An individual report is pulled online with an Emirates ID or UAE Pass. A commercial report requires the original valid Emirates ID of an owner or authorised signatory, a valid trade licence and the original Articles of Association, and is "subject to the approval of the Al Etihad Credit Bureau legal department" (u.ae).
• The commercial score is a 12-month default probability. It "ranges from 300 to 900 and measures how likely an organisation is to default within the next 12 months," calculated from bank, finance company and telecom data (Gulf News, *Al Etihad Credit Bureau begins to issue commercial credit scores*).
• Gross credit in the UAE banking system reached AED 2,570.3 bn at December 2025, up 17.9% year on year (CBUAE, *UAE Monetary, Banking & Financial Markets Developments, Q4 2025*). Book growth at that rate is exactly the environment in which a bureau report gets skimmed rather than read.

Before anything else: what can and cannot be confirmed about the layout

Read this caveat before you use anything below operationally. AECB's own site (aecb.gov.ae) blocks automated retrieval, and AECB publishes no public data dictionary, sample report or field glossary. Everything in this guide about content is sourced to the UAE Government portal, the Central Bank and UAE bank explainer pages. Everything about section names, ordering, field labels and codes is a reconstruction of how practitioners describe the documents. Confirm the exact layout against a live report and AECB's own file specification before you build a parser, a policy rule or a scorecard field on it.

That caveat matters more than it looks. A credit policy that says "decline if the report shows a status code of 3" is unauditable if nobody in the bank can point to the document that defines code 3.

Which AECB report is actually on the file?

Start here, because analysts routinely assess a company on the strength of a document that is about a person.

Two UAE Government pages describe different channels for the company report — one says to visit an AECB customer service centre, another says to apply on the AECB website and then attend "any of the 250+ Al Ansari Exchange branches in the UAE." Confirm the current channel with AECB before writing it into an onboarding SOP. A 2018 Gulf News report priced a commercial credit report with score at AED 220; current fees are not confirmable at source.

Two operational consequences. First, the company report has a lead time and a document dependency, so it must be requested on day one of the file, not on the day the memo is due — you cannot pull it without the trade licence and AOA already in hand. Second, on a sole establishment there is no separate legal personality, so the individual report is the primary credit document and the company report is supporting. On an LLC it is the reverse. Get this the wrong way round and you have assessed the wrong balance sheet.

What order should you read the report in?

Not front to back. In this order, which is roughly the order in which the document can mislead you:

1. Header and identity block — is this the right subject, and how old is the pull?
2. Score — triage only.
3. Credit-contract summary — how many facilities, how much outstanding, how many lenders.
4. Facility-level detail — the debt schedule, and the 36-month grid.
5. Cheque return history — a legal exposure, not just a payment miss.
6. Court obligations — enforcement already in motion.
7. Income utilisation ratio (individual report) — the capacity constraint.
8. Enquiries — who else has been asked recently. Whether AECB reports show a searchable enquiry history to lenders, and over what window, is not confirmable at source.
9. Cross-read against the other report — the step this article exists for.

Everything before step 4 takes about ninety seconds. Everything after it is the work.

Step 1: the identity block, and the two ways it goes wrong

The header carries, per a UAE bank's own consumer explainer, "your name, Emirates ID and contact details" alongside the report date and the score (ADCB, *Understanding what lenders see in your AECB report*). On the company report the equivalent is the licensed name and licence number.

Two failure modes, both common enough to check every time:

• Name-form mismatch. Arabic transliteration produces multiple valid spellings of the same person. "Mohammed", "Mohamed", "Muhammad" and "Mohd" are all the same guarantor, and a report pulled on one spelling with no Emirates ID match may be a different human being entirely. Match on the Emirates ID number, never on the name.
• Licence-number mismatch. UAE SME groups routinely hold several licences, sometimes with near-identical trade names across a mainland LLC and a free-zone FZ-LLC. A company report is scoped to one licence number. Confirm the licence number on the report against the licence in the file, digit for digit, before you read a single facility. This is the same discipline as mapping every document in a multi-entity file to the right borrower.

Then check the report date. The ADCB page states the report is "updated monthly," and the CBUAE requires institutions to "perform a new check with the Al Etihad Credit Bureau for an updated credit history" rather than rely on a stale pull (CBUAE Rulebook, *Article 7: Responsible Financing Practice*). A report pulled at application and used at sanction three months later has already missed two reporting cycles.

Step 2: the score, and the ninety seconds it deserves

Both reports carry a three-digit number on a 300–900 scale. On the individual report it predicts personal payment behaviour; on the company report it is an entity default probability over twelve months.

Use it to sort the queue and price the file. Do not use it as a threshold, because AECB does not publish official band boundaries and UAE banks' own published tables contradict each other — at 660, one bank's table says "Good" and two others say "Fair." A cut-off written from a number you read on a competitor's marketing page is a cut-off you cannot defend to a supervisor.

Two things the score cannot do, both of which matter more on a company file than a personal one:

• It has no direction. A 690 that is a recovering 630 and a 690 that is a falling 760 read identically.
• It has no scale. A company with AED 400,000 of facilities and a company with AED 40 million can carry the same score. Size risk is not in the number.

Step 3: the credit-contract summary

This is the page most analysts photograph and paste into the memo. It gives you counts and totals: how many active facilities, total sanctioned, total outstanding, number of distinct lenders.

Read three things off it and then move on:

1. Lender count versus facility count. Six facilities across two banks is a relationship. Six facilities across six lenders on a company with AED 12 million of turnover is a borrower who has been declined somewhere and gone shopping.
2. Total outstanding versus what the application declared. Write both numbers down now. The gap is the first question for the borrower.
3. Utilisation on revolving lines. A borrower running an overdraft at 96% of limit for eighteen months does not have a facility, it has a term loan with no amortisation schedule.

Step 4: facility-level detail — where the file is actually decided

Per credit contract you get lender, product type, status (active, closed, delinquent), sanctioned limit, current outstanding, instalment, and a month-by-month payment record across 36 months, with overdue amount and days past due where applicable (ADCB).

The full technique for this block — reading the grid as a shape rather than a count, weighting the last six months, counting transitions rather than states, treating closed facilities as history rather than noise — is set out in reading AECB facility data, and it is the same craft as reading 36 months of repayment history anywhere else.

The point specific to this article is what you extract for the cross-read: for every facility, on both reports, capture the lender, the outstanding, the monthly instalment, and the worst status in the last twelve months. You will need all four in the reconciliation below.

Step 5: how the individual report differs — the income utilisation ratio

The individual report carries something the company report does not: an income utilisation ratio, which u.ae describes as showing "how your payments impact your last reported income."

For a commercial lender this is the guarantor's capacity constraint, and it interacts directly with the CBUAE debt burden ratio ceiling of "50 percent of gross salary and any regular income from a defined and specific source at any time" (CBUAE Rulebook, *Article 3: Important Ratios*). A personal guarantee from an owner whose personal obligations already consume most of their declared income is a document, not a credit enhancement. Whether the income utilisation ratio on the report is computed on the same income definition the DBR regulation uses is not confirmable at source; treat it as indicative and recompute from the guarantor's own income evidence.

The individual report also carries the non-credit records that make thin files scoreable at all — telecom and utility payment history — which for a young promoter may be the only repayment behaviour on the document.

Step 6: how the company report differs — and what it leaves out

The company report is entity-scoped, and that single property generates most of the errors in UAE SME underwriting.

What it adds over the individual report: facilities in the entity's own name, the entity's cheque return history, and the commercial score. What it silently omits:

• Facilities in the owner's name that fund the business. Extremely common in UAE SMEs, where a promoter takes a personal loan or credit card and injects it as shareholder funding.
• Facilities in a sister licence. A company report on the Dubai mainland LLC says nothing about the JAFZA FZ-LLC with the same UBO.
• Guarantees given. A guarantee by the borrower for another entity's facility is a contingent liability the report will not surface.
• Trade credit. Supplier credit is the dominant working-capital source for UAE trading businesses and sits almost entirely outside the bureau.

Whether the company report lists the entity's shareholders, managers or related individuals as a linkage section is not confirmable at source. Do not assume the report will do the group mapping for you.

Step 7: reading the two together on an owner-managed SME

Here is the whole method, on numbers.

Step A — the company report

Step B — the individual report on Mr. Haddad

The 5% credit card minimum is an illustrative convention; individual UAE banks apply their own.

Step C — three arithmetic tests, in order

Test 1 — entity debt service coverage, company report only.

Annual debt service: 103,900 × 12 = 1,246,800 DSCR: 4,200,000 ÷ 1,246,800 = 3.37x

On the company report alone this is a comfortable file.

Test 2 — the guarantor's capacity.

Mr. Haddad's declared regular income (director's remuneration plus villa rental): AED 118,000 per month. DBR ceiling at 50%: 118,000 × 0.50 = 59,000 Existing personal obligations: 63,000

63,000 > 59,000. The guarantor is already above a 50% debt burden on his own income before the guarantee is signed. The personal guarantee is worth close to nothing as a repayment source. That conclusion is invisible on the company report and unmissable on the individual one. The general method is the same as any FOIR or debt-burden computation, applied to a guarantor rather than a borrower.

Test 3 — the combined view, which is the one that decides the file.

Two of Mr. Haddad's personal loans, at Banks D and E, were drawn in the same two months that the company's overdraft utilisation moved from 41% to 94%. On enquiry, both were injected into the company as shareholder loans and are serviced from company distributions.

If the servicing source is company cash, the debt belongs in company debt service:

Combined monthly servicing: 103,900 + 21,500 + 14,200 = 139,600 Annual: 139,600 × 12 = 1,675,200 Combined DSCR: 4,200,000 ÷ 1,675,200 = 2.51x

Add the proposed AED 6,000,000 facility. At an indicative 7.5% reducing over 60 months — an illustrative assumption, not observed pricing — the instalment is approximately AED 120,000 per month.

Pro-forma annual debt service: (139,600 + 120,000) × 12 = 259,600 × 12 = 3,115,200 Pro-forma DSCR: 4,200,000 ÷ 3,115,200 = 1.35x

Against the company report alone, the same pro-forma would have read:

(103,900 + 120,000) × 12 = 223,900 × 12 = 2,686,800 4,200,000 ÷ 2,686,800 = 1.56x

A 0.21x difference, entirely from reading the owner's file. On a 1.40x covenant, one version passes and the other does not. Neither report on its own gives you the right number.

What do you do when the two reports disagree?

Four patterns, and what each one means.

The general rule: the worse of the two files sets the risk grade, not the average. In owner-managed SMEs the two credits are one credit, whatever the legal structure says.

And when neither report explains the numbers, the answer is not on the bureau at all — it is in the bank statements. Total the instalments both reports disclose and compare them to loan-servicing debits across twelve months of statements from every account, which is the standard bureau-to-bank-statement reconciliation. A residual gap after both reports have been read is undisclosed borrowing, a guarantee, or a private lender.

Where each report runs out

Different limits, and they should be written into the risk-factors section separately rather than as one generic caveat.

The individual report cannot tell you: whether declared income is real (verify independently — the CBUAE requires institutions to "verify the Consumer's income against reliable sources" and not rely on self-declaration), whether the person controls other licensed entities, or whether personal facilities are in fact business borrowings.

The company report cannot tell you: anything about the group, cash flow, trade credit, guarantees given, or the identity of the people behind the licence. It also cannot tell you scale-adjusted risk, because the score is not size-weighted.

Neither can tell you: what paid the instalments. A company servicing debt from shareholder injections and one servicing it from operating cash produce identical bureau records. That distinction only appears when you spread the financials and read the statements, which is why the CBUAE Credit Risk Management Standards require that "LFIs must collect comprehensive financial information and cash flow projections from their Obligors, contingent Obligors and guarantors" and analyse "leverage, debt service coverage ratio, liquidity, net worth and operating cash flows" (CBUAE Rulebook, *Credit Risk Management Standards*).

The bureau is the starting point of a UAE SME file. The complete underwriting sequence is where it ends up, and the general craft of reading a commercial bureau report end to end transfers across markets even where the field names do not.

Frequently asked questions

What does an AECB credit report show lenders?

The credit score, 36 months of loan and bill payment history, a summary of every credit card and loan, an income utilisation ratio on individual reports, bounced cheque records and court-ordered financial obligations. The data comes from banks, finance companies, telecom and utility providers, courts and government entities.

How do you read AECB instalment history?

As a shape, not a count. Read the month-by-month grid across all facilities at once rather than down one, weight the most recent six months at least double the older thirty, and count the transitions between arrears buckets. Four late months clustered two years ago and four late months in the last quarter are completely different credits.

What is the difference between an AECB individual and company report?

The individual report is keyed to an Emirates ID and covers a person's own facilities, plus an income utilisation ratio. The company report is keyed to a trade licence and covers only that licensed entity. On an owner-managed SME you need both, because facilities that fund the business often sit in the owner's name.

Which report should we pull first?

The company report, because it takes longer and needs documents you may not have yet — a valid trade licence, the original Articles of Association and an owner's Emirates ID. Individual reports come back in minutes. Request the company report on day one of the file.

Do we need an individual report on every shareholder?

Not every shareholder, but every person who will sign, guarantee or control. In practice that means each authorised signatory, each personal guarantor, and any shareholder above your policy threshold. On a sole establishment the owner's individual report is the primary document.

What if the company report and the owner's report tell different stories?

The worse of the two sets the risk grade. A clean personal file behind a deteriorating company file is the more serious pattern, because it usually means the promoter is protecting their own record while the entity slips — and the personal guarantee you are relying on is being actively managed.

Does the AECB report cover other companies in the same group?

No. A company report is scoped to a single trade licence. If the borrower's group holds a mainland LLC and a free-zone entity, you need a report for each licence, and you still will not see guarantees given between them.

Can we rely on the AECB score as a cut-off?

No, for two reasons. AECB does not publish official band boundaries, and UAE banks' own published tables disagree with each other at the same score. Set thresholds from your own portfolio's observed default rates by score decile, and treat the number as triage rather than decision.

How current does the report have to be?

Current enough that the decision rests on it. Institutions must perform a fresh check with the bureau for an updated credit history rather than rely on an earlier pull, and reporting is monthly — so a report pulled at application and used at sanction three months later has missed two cycles.

Are the field names in this guide safe to build a parser on?

No. AECB publishes no public data dictionary, and every layout description here is a reconstruction. Confirm section names, status labels and codes against a live report and AECB's own file specification before writing any of them into an extraction rule or a policy test.

Key takeaways

1. Read in a fixed order. Identity, score, contract summary, facility detail, cheques, courts, capacity, cross-read. The first three steps take ninety seconds; everything after is the work.
2. Match on Emirates ID and licence number, never on name. Transliteration and near-identical group trade names are the two ways a report ends up on the wrong file.
3. Both reports, always, on an owner-managed SME. In the worked file, reading the owner's report moved pro-forma DSCR from 1.56x to 1.35x and revealed a guarantor already over a 50% debt burden.
4. When the two disagree, the worse one governs. A clean personal file behind a slipping company file is the pattern to fear, not the reverse.
5. Do not build systems on field names nobody has published. Confirm the data model against a live report before automating anything.

YuSight's Bureau Analyzer reads AECB individual and company reports together rather than as separate documents: it extracts every facility, instalment and arrears record at 95.2% extraction accuracy validated against a manual benchmark, assigns each facility to the correct entity or person in the group, and produces the combined debt-service view that the two reports only give you when they are read against one another. Every figure carries a citation back to the page it came from, so the AED 139,600 in the worked example above is a number a credit committee can check rather than argue about. The output flows straight into the financial spreading and bank statement analysis in the same file.

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