ASNEF

ASNEF is a registry of defaults that Spanish lenders, telecoms and utilities report to, and that insurers check. RAI, FIM and CIRBE serve related purposes; between them they are the credit picture a solvency study looks at.

For a foreign applicant the risk is usually not a genuine debt but a stale one: a Spanish phone or utility account from a previous stay, closed badly, still sitting there. It does not need to be large to fail a file.

You have a right to know what is recorded about you and to have wrong entries corrected. If you have lived in Spain before and a promising application has died without explanation, this is worth checking before the next one.