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I guess from a certain point of view you're right, a credit score is a list of all the debts you've had an how you've paid them back.

So somebody with no debt is "unknown", rather than the expected "good".

In Finland we don't have credit scores, instead we allow looking up defaults. Which seems like a reasonably sane approach - known-bad borrowers find it hard to repeat that behaviour, and somebody with no history of taking loans/debts isn't penalized.

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> In Finland we don't have credit scores, instead we allow looking up defaults.

There is also the newly established The Positive credit register which contains list of all of your debts. Lenders must pull (started in April 2024) the information from there when they are making the decision to grant or deny the request. The report also contains your income for past 12 months (I assume those reported to Income Register). I'm not sure if there is regulation on if they actually need to use the data or not.