CRIF is a licensed credit bureau. TatvaRatings is a structured index over public rating disclosures. Almost everything that differs between them follows from that one sentence, and it is worth working through rather than glossing.
Product pages change — if something here is out of date, tell us.
The short answer
If you need to know how a company has been servicing its credit facilities, that is bureau data, and if you are a specified user you should get it. This site does not replace it and does not attempt to.
If you need to see the shape of a rated book from the lender’s side — which rated borrowers name a given bank, how a sector’s rated credit distributes across lenders — that is a question about published disclosure, and it is what TatvaRatings is organised around.
Side by side
| Attribute | CRIF High Mark | TatvaRatings |
|---|---|---|
| Statutory basis | CICRA 2005; RBI registration | None. No regulatory status |
| Source of data | Member lender submissions | Public rating agency press releases |
| Universe | Companies with reported credit facilities | Rated borrowers only — 45,528 |
| Repayment behaviour | Yes | No |
| Score or rank | Yes | No. No score of our own |
| Unit of query | One named company, report out | A lender, a sector, or a company |
| Amounts | As reported by member lenders | Sanctioned limits as at the rating action date |
| Who may obtain it | Specified users / member institutions | By commercial agreement |
What TatvaRatings holds
TatvaRatings corpus as at 30 August 2026. Earliest rating action May 2019. 46.2% of rating actions carry a lender-wise annexure, so every count is a floor, not a total.
What CRIF describes itself as
CRIF identifies itself as “India’s Leading RBI Licensed Credit Bureau”, now operating as CRIF Credit Information Services Pvt. Ltd., formerly CRIF High Mark. Its homepage leads with consumer credit scores — “Your Credit Score is your gateway to better opportunities” — with institutional access routed through a member login. (crifhighmark.com)
The site’s principal proof device is the licence itself, stated flatly and first. Alongside it CRIF publishes a set of named, recurring research artefacts — titled periodicals such as Wheels Finance, MicroLend and FINSIGHT — which is a well-established credibility pattern in Indian financial services.
Pricing is not published for institutional products; the route is contact-us. Access is self-serve for a consumer’s own score and member-gated for institutional use.
What holding a licence actually means
This is the part worth understanding on its own terms, because it is not a marketing distinction.
A credit information company operates under the Credit Information Companies (Regulation) Act, 2005. It is registered with the RBI. Its members — banks and other credit institutions — are under an obligation to submit credit information to it, and it in turn may disclose credit information to specified users under section 17(4) of that Act. Disclosure outside that set is barred.
Three things follow.
The data is lender-submitted. A bureau holds what its member institutions report: facility-level credit behaviour, repayment performance, days past due, defaults, across companies whether or not they are rated. Nothing built from public disclosure has any equivalent to that, and nothing on this site is a substitute for it.
Access is a legal question, not a commercial one. Whether you can obtain a commercial credit information report is determined by whether you are a specified user, not by whether you can pay.
The product shape is set by the regime. Entity-in, report-out, on a named company, to a permitted recipient.
What TatvaRatings is
A different source under a different basis. Stated plainly, because a compliance reviewer will ask:
TatvaRatings holds no registration, licence, recognition or approval from the RBI or SEBI, and claims none. It is not a credit rating agency and not a credit information company. It holds no lender-submitted credit information and does not operate under CICRA 2005; nothing about it should be read as sitting inside that regime — or as a route around it. Those are separate frameworks with separate bases; they are not tiers of the same thing.
What it is: publicly published credit rating press releases from seven SEBI-registered credit rating agencies, parsed into structured records — borrowers, rating actions, rated facilities, key financials, rating drivers, and the lender-wise annexure naming the bank behind each rated bank facility — and indexed from the lender’s side.
Those documents are public because SEBI requires each agency to publish an issuer-specific press release for every rating action and to keep an archive of its disclosures on its own website for at least ten years. Sources and the rights position →
A worked reading of the figures above: SBI appears in 5,476 borrower annexures as at 30 August 2026 — a floor, not a total.
What TatvaRatings does not do
- No repayment behaviour, no days-past-due, no default history. That is bureau data.
- No consumer credit, no retail lending data, in any form.
- No unrated companies. Most Indian companies have never been rated.
- Only 46.2% of rating actions carry a lender-wise annexure — Acuité 92.0%, Infomerics 66.6%, Brickwork 59.2% (on only 76 actions), CARE 52.4%, CRISIL 46.0%, ICRA 43.3%, India Ratings 0.0%. Every count is a floor, not a total.
- Sanctioned, not outstanding, on a periodic, broadly annual review cycle — a typical record is a year or more old. An annexure is a dated snapshot, not a feed.
- Not a system of record. Not for regulatory reporting, capital computation, or any determination where completeness is a requirement.
Which one you actually want
If you need to know how a company has been servicing its credit facilities, that is bureau data, and if you are a specified user you should get it. This site does not replace it and does not attempt to.
If you need to see the shape of a rated book from the lender’s side — which rated borrowers name a given bank, how a sector’s rated credit distributes across lenders — that is a question about published disclosure, and it is what TatvaRatings is organised around.
Common questions
Is TatvaRatings an alternative to CRIF High Mark?
Not for bureau data. CRIF is an RBI-licensed credit information company holding lender-submitted credit behaviour — repayment performance, days past due, defaults — which nothing built from public disclosure has any equivalent to. TatvaRatings is a structured index over public rating disclosures, answering the lender-side question instead; its limits are on Data limits and the wider field is mapped on the comparisons hub.
Who can get a CRIF High Mark commercial credit report?
Access is a legal question, not a commercial one: under section 17(4) of the Credit Information Companies (Regulation) Act, 2005, a bureau may disclose credit information only to specified users, and whether you can obtain a report is determined by whether you are one — not by whether you can pay. The CIBIL commercial report page covers the same category.
Is TatvaRatings regulated by the RBI or SEBI?
No. TatvaRatings holds no registration, licence, recognition or approval from the RBI or SEBI, and claims none. It is not a credit rating agency and not a credit information company, and nothing about it should be read as sitting inside the CICRA regime — or as a route around it. The source basis is public SEBI-mandated rating disclosure, set out on Sources and bounded on Data limits.
What does TatvaRatings hold instead of bureau data?
Publicly published rating press releases from seven SEBI-registered agencies, parsed into borrowers, rating actions, rated facilities, key financials, rating drivers and the lender-wise annexure, indexed from the lender's side. Only 46.2% of rating actions carry an annexure, so every count is a floor — the measured figures are on Coverage.
Related
- All comparisons
- CIBIL commercial report — the same category
- What CRILC is · Who can access CRILC data
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