Schufa

This is the abbreviation for Schutzgemeinschaft für Allgemeine Kreditsicherung. It gathers information to assess the creditworthiness of individuals. Schufa exchanges this data with institutions and supplies them to banks, for example, upon request. Data protection is, of course, taken into account.

You have the option to request a free copy of your data. Doing so once a year makes sense to check if all information is accurately stored or if a correction needs to be initiated. Here is the link for that.