Gambling Support

We’re committed to responsible lending and supporting our members’ financial wellbeing. If you’re concerned about how gambling may impact your finances, here’s what you need to know about its effect on your credit score and loan applications.

Gambling & Your Credit Score

While gambling itself doesn’t directly affect your credit score, the way you fund it can. Here’s how:

• Frequent gambling transactions – If lenders see regular gambling deposits on your bank statements, they may view this as a sign of financial instability.
• Increased borrowing – Using overdrafts, credit cards, or loans to gamble can increase your debt, which may lower your credit score.
• Missed payments – If gambling leads to financial strain and missed repayments on credit cards or loans, this will negatively impact your credit rating.

Gambling & Credit Union Loan Applications

As a responsible lender, we assess loan applications carefully to ensure borrowing is affordable for you. Here’s how gambling activity might affect your loan application:

• Affordability checks – We review bank statements to ensure you can comfortably afford the loan repayments. High gambling expenditure or a high number of gambling transactions may indicate a financial risk and the loan application may be refused, or a lower, more affordable, offer made.
• Gambling winnings – these are not considered to be income, so cannot be considered as part of the affordability calculations
• Responsible lending – If gambling has led to missed payments or financial difficulties, this could impact your ability to borrow.
• Allowing others – allowing other people to use your bank account details or cards for gambling transactions will be on your record.
• Support over debt – If you’re struggling with gambling-related financial issues, we encourage you to seek help (above) before taking on more credit.
• Signposting – As part of our financial health check if we see significant gambling transactions, we will suggest that you contact one of the local or national supported organisations.
• The door is always open – if we can see that action has been taken to address gambling concerns, then we will do what we can to lend within our criteria.