Reading AECB Facility Data: Instalment History, Bounced Cheques and Defaults

An Al Etihad Credit Bureau report carries 36 months of payment history at facility level, a record of returned cheques, court obligations and both active and closed credit contracts. The score compresses all of it into three digits. The facility data is where an underwriter actually finds undisclosed borrowing, deteriorating discipline and the cheque history that carries legal consequences in the UAE.

Key facts

• YuSight cites 100% of the figures it produces, each one traceable in one click to the source document and page — so every instalment, arrear and cheque return quoted in a credit memo can be checked against the bureau report it came from rather than re-keyed and argued about.
• The window is 36 months. The UAE Government portal describes the report as containing "payment history — it is a record of your loan and bill payments for the last 36 months," alongside credit contracts, an income utilisation ratio, court obligations and the credit score, collected "from banks, financial companies, telecom and utility providers, courts and government entities" (u.ae, *Credit report of individuals and companies*).
• Four returned cheques close the account. Under Central Bank instructions, where "at least four cheques are returned due to insufficient funds, within a maximum period of one year between the first cheque and the fourth cheque … their accounts must be closed for a period of two years," extending to three years on repetition, with unused cheques recovered (Khaleej Times, citing the CBUAE Q&A on the amendments to the Commercial Transactions Law).
• A bounced cheque is now a writ of execution. Under Federal Decree-Law No. 50 of 2022, "a Cheque bearing a statement by the Drawee denoting that it was not paid due to insufficient or lack of balance is deemed an executive document" (Article 667), enforceable directly through the execution judge (Hadef & Partners, *The Cheque as an Executory Instrument in UAE Legislation*).
• The banking system's NPL ratio was 4.7% at December 2024, improved from 5.9% in 2023, with the net NPL ratio at 2.0% (CBUAE, *Financial Stability Report 2024*). The facilities that became that 4.7% were visible as arrears patterns on a bureau report months earlier.

What is actually in the facility section?

A caveat you should read before the rest of this page. AECB's own site (aecb.gov.ae) blocks automated retrieval, and AECB publishes no public data dictionary, sample report or glossary. Everything below about layout, column headings, status labels and codes is reconstructed from the UAE Government portal, CBUAE material and UAE bank explainer pages. Do not write any field name or status code from this article into a parser, a policy or a scorecard without confirming it against a live report and AECB's own file specification.

What is confirmable is the content. A UAE bank's own consumer explainer lists the report as carrying "Credit accounts: Details of loans, credit cards, mortgages and overdrafts — both active and closed," "Payment history: Whether you have paid on time or missed deadlines," "Bounced cheques: Any returned cheques due to insufficient funds," and "Outstanding balances: How much you owe across all facilities," and says lenders look at "Account status: Are your loans and cards active, closed or delinquent?" and "Repayment patterns: Any 30-, 60-, or 90-day late payments?" (ADCB, *Understanding what lenders see in your AECB report*).

So the facility block gives you, per credit contract:

Whether the report expresses arrears as an integer bucket (0/30/60/90), a days-past-due count, or a lettered status is not confirmable at source. Both conventions appear in third-party descriptions.

How do you read 36 months of instalment history?

Not as a count of missed payments. As a shape.

Take the same borrower's record two ways. Both have four late months out of thirty-six. They are not the same credit.

Borrower A and Borrower B may carry the same score. The AECB score is a rank, not a direction — it cannot tell you whether a 690 is a 640 recovering or a 750 falling apart. Only the grid does that, which is why the general discipline of reading 36 months of repayment history as a judgement rather than a count matters more here than in markets with richer bureau data.

Four rules that hold up in committee:

1. Weight the last six months at least double the first thirty. Recency dominates.
2. Read across facilities, not down one. One facility at 60 DPD while five stay current is usually a dispute or a direct-debit failure. Five facilities slipping together in the same month is cash.
3. Count the transitions, not the states. Current → 30 → current → 30 is a payment-mechanics problem. Current → 30 → 60 → 90 is a business.
4. Read the credit card separately. Revolving minimums are the first thing a stressed SME promoter stops paying and the first thing they resume. Cards lead term loans by roughly a quarter in most portfolios. This lead-lag is a practitioner observation, not a published UAE statistic.

What does a bounced cheque record mean in the UAE specifically?

More than a missed payment, because a UAE cheque is not just a payment instrument. It is security, and since 2022 it is an enforcement instrument.

The legal position changed in two steps. Federal Decree-Law No. 14 of 2020 took effect on 2 January 2022, decriminalising most bounced cheques while requiring the drawee bank to pay partially up to the available funds and making the dishonoured cheque enforceable without a fresh lawsuit. Federal Decree-Law No. 50 of 2022, the current Commercial Transactions Law, took effect on 2 January 2023 and carries the provision forward at Article 667. The article number for the partial payment obligation under Decree-Law No. 50 of 2022 could not be confirmed at source; it was Article 617 in the previous law as amended.

What that means at the credit desk:

• A returned cheque on the bureau is a lien waiting to be executed. The holder can go straight to the execution judge. Your borrower's other creditors can attach assets faster than you can call your own facility.
• Cheque returns are reported to AECB and they reduce creditworthiness. The Central Bank required banks, from December 2018, to check the AECB before issuing cheque books, limited new customers to "a cheque book containing a maximum of 10 individual cheques," and permitted a further book only after six months with no returns — noting that "returned cheques due to insufficient funds on the account will be recorded with the AECB and will negatively affect the creditworthiness of customers" (CBUAE press release, December 2018; Retail Banker International, 11 December 2018).
• Four in twelve months is a cliff, not a slope. The account closes for two years and unused cheques are recovered. A borrower on their third return in ten months is one event away from losing the instrument its entire supplier arrangement runs on.

So the count matters, and so does the clock. Ask three questions of every cheque record:

1. How many, and inside what window? Three in fourteen months and three in nine months are different risks under the same rule.
2. Was it re-presented and cleared? A cleared re-presentation is a timing failure. An uncleared return is a credit event.
3. Who was the payee? A landlord, a supplier or a bank tells you which relationship broke first. Security cheques given to a lender that bounce are the most serious version, because they mean the last line of protection has already failed.

What do default and write-off records tell you?

They tell you the outcome, not the story, and they are the hardest records to interpret without asking.

• A settled default is not a clean default. Settlement at less than full value means a lender took a loss. Ask for the settlement letter and the amount, because the bureau entry alone will not distinguish a full payoff from a 40-fils-in-the-dirham compromise.
• A write-off on a closed facility still matters. The obligation may be extinguished; the behaviour is not.
• Court obligations sit in their own section. The report includes "a summary of court-ordered financial obligations" (u.ae). A judgement against a promoter is a direct threat to a personal guarantee.
• How long adverse records remain visible is not published at source. Third-party guides cite periods ranging from 24 months for a single missed payment to five years from write-off. Neither figure is confirmable on a government or AECB page. Do not quote a retention period to a borrower or write one into policy without confirming with AECB directly.

The judgement call: a five-year-old settled default on a promoter who has since run three years of clean facilities is a conversation. A two-year-old default with thin activity since is a decline. What you cannot do is treat "default present: yes/no" as a binary field, which is exactly what an automated policy rule does if nobody reads the dates.

Active versus closed facilities: why the closed ones matter

Analysts filter closed facilities out. That is a mistake, for three reasons.

1. Closed facilities carry the borrower's longest history. If the active book is eighteen months old, the closed facilities are where your 36 months of behaviour actually lives.
2. An early-settled facility is a positive signal you would otherwise miss — usually a refinancing at a better rate, which tells you another lender competed for this borrower and won.
3. A facility closed at the same moment a larger one opened elsewhere is a consolidation. Total debt did not fall. Read the pair together or you will book a deleveraging that never happened.

Closed facilities go in the narrative section of the memo. Active facilities go in the debt schedule. Never the other way round.

Worked example: finding the facility that is not on the report

Step 1 — total the instalments the AECB company report discloses

Step 2 — total what the bank statements actually pay out

Twelve months of statements across Bank A, Bank C and a third account the borrower did not initially disclose show loan-servicing debits averaging AED 262,500 per month.

Step 3 — the difference

262,500 − 214,000 = AED 48,500 per month unaccounted for

Annualised: 48,500 × 12 = AED 582,000 per year

Working backwards to an implied principal, at a 48-month tenor and an indicative 9% reducing rate, an instalment of 48,500 implies roughly AED 1,950,000 of undisclosed borrowing. The 9% rate and 48-month tenor are illustrative assumptions used to size the gap, not observed terms.

The narrative turned out to be a facility taken by the promoter's second licence — a free-zone entity — with Delta Marine as guarantor. It never appeared on Delta Marine's own company report because the borrower of record was a different legal entity. This is the standard UAE SME group-structure failure, and the only way to catch it is the bureau-to-bank-statement reconciliation.

Step 4 — what it does to the decision

A 0.40x swing, entirely from one line the bureau report could not have shown you. If your covenant sits at 1.75x, the difference between those two numbers is the difference between comfortable headroom and a breach at the first test date.

Where the AECB data runs out

Six limits, all of which belong in the risk-factors section rather than being quietly ignored:

• It is entity-scoped. A report covers one licence. Group exposure needs a report per licence.
• It has no cash flow. Instalments paid tell you nothing about what paid them. Shareholder injections and operating cash look identical.
• Trade credit is largely invisible. Supplier credit is the dominant working-capital source for UAE trading businesses and mostly sits outside the bureau.
• Reporting is periodic. Institutions supply data monthly, so a distress event can sit outside the report for weeks.
• Thin files are common. A profitable, unlevered four-year-old company has almost no bureau record. That is not low risk; it is no information.
• The data model is not public. Which brings you back to the caveat at the top of this page.

The Central Bank's own instruction is the right posture: "LFIs must limit their reliance on external credit assessment" and must form "their own independent view of the Credit Risk" (CBUAE Rulebook, *Credit Risk Management Regulation* C 3/2024). Institutions are also required 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*).

Frequently asked questions

What does a bounced cheque flag mean on an AECB report?

It means a cheque was returned unpaid for insufficient funds and the bank reported it to the bureau. In the UAE that carries weight a missed instalment does not: a dishonoured cheque is an executive instrument the holder can enforce directly, and four returns inside twelve months closes the customer's account for two years.

How many months of instalment history does AECB show?

Thirty-six. The UAE Government portal describes the report as containing a record of loan and bill payments for the last 36 months. Read the most recent six months as the primary signal and the older thirty as context — the direction of travel matters more than the total count of late months.

How do you spot undisclosed borrowings in an AECB file?

You do not spot them in the AECB file. You spot them by totalling the instalments the bureau discloses and comparing that number against the loan-servicing debits on twelve months of bank statements from every account. The gap is either an undisclosed facility, a guarantee for a related entity, or a private lender.

Does a settled default clear a borrower's record?

No. Settlement records the outcome, not the behaviour, and a settlement at less than face value means a lender took a loss. Ask for the settlement letter and the amount, because the bureau entry alone will not tell you whether the borrower paid in full or compromised.

Should closed facilities be included in the debt schedule?

No, but they should be read. Closed facilities carry the borrower's longest payment history, and a facility closed in the same month a larger one opened elsewhere is a refinancing, not a repayment. Put them in the memo's narrative, not the debt table.

How long do negative records stay on an AECB report?

We could not confirm a retention period at source. AECB does not publish a data dictionary and third-party guides give figures ranging from 24 months for a single missed payment to five years from write-off. Confirm directly with AECB before quoting a period to a borrower or building it into policy.

Can you get an AECB report on a company and its owners separately?

Yes, and you should get both. The company credit report covers the licensed entity; individual reports cover each partner, manager and personal guarantor. In UAE SME lending the promoter's personal file is often the longer and more predictive record.

Do telecom and utility bills appear in the report?

Yes. The bureau collects data from banks, finance companies, telecom and utility providers, courts and government entities. For a thin-file borrower those non-credit records may be the only repayment behaviour on the report at all.

What is the single most useful thing on the facility page?

The month-by-month grid for the last six months, read across every facility at once. A single facility slipping is usually mechanical. Several slipping in the same month is a cash-flow event, and it is the earliest one you will get from the bureau.

Key takeaways

1. The grid beats the score. Two borrowers with identical scores and identical late-payment counts can be recovering and deteriorating respectively. Only the 36-month history distinguishes them.
2. Cheque returns are a legal event in the UAE, not just a credit one. A dishonoured cheque is enforceable through the execution judge, and four inside a year closes the account for two.
3. Reconcile bureau instalments to bank statement debits every time. In the worked file above that single comparison moved DSCR from 2.18x to 1.78x.
4. Do not trust field names you have not seen. AECB publishes no public data dictionary. Confirm layout and status codes against a live report before automating anything.
5. Pull a report for every licence in the group. Entity-scoped data plus multi-licence borrowers equals systematically understated exposure.

YuSight's Repayment Tracker does the step most analysts skip: it reads the AECB facility block and twelve months of multi-bank statements side by side, matches instalments to debits, and flags the servicing outflows that have no bureau counterpart. Every figure it reports is cited back to the page it came from — 100% of figures cited, with one-click source verification — so a credit committee can check the AED 48,500 gap instead of debating whether it exists. The same output feeds straight into the bank statement analysis and the turnover reconciliation in the same file.

Run one borrower through the analyzer — book a live demo.