Quickstart

Fetching a consumer's credit data

This quick start tutorial will guide you through typical usage of the Bloom Credit Data API, to fetch a consumer's credit data. All concepts in this guide are discussed in more detail in their respective pages under the "concepts" header in the sidebar.

There are 3 major steps in the process of fetching a consumer's credit data:

1. Register the consumer
2. Order Credit Data
3. Fetch the consumer's data

Before we begin...

API Authentication

All requests to the Bloom API must be authenticated. Check out the API Authentication Guide to learn how to retrieve an access token and use it to authenticate your API requests. All requests in this guide will assume you have already successfully fetched an access token.

Step 1: Register the consumer

The first step towards fetching a consumer's credit data is registering the consumer within Bloom. Once registered, you will have a unique consumer_id that you can refer to in future steps to perform actions on that consumer. To register a consumer, send a POST request to /consumers with the consumer's personal information in the request body:

{
  "method": "post",
  "url": "https://sandbox.bloom.dev/v1/consumers",
  "headers": {
    "Authorization": "Bearer <ACCESS_TOKEN>",
    "content-type": "application/json"
  },
  "body": {
    "name": "Michael Scott",
    "address": {
      "line1": "1725 Slough Avenue",
      "city": "Scranton",
      "state": "PA",
      "zipCode": "18503"
    },
    "dateOfBirth": "1964-03-15",
    "ssn": "123456789",
    "income": 78994
  }
}

💡 Quick tip

Click the Code Generation tab above to see an example of this request in your language of choice.

The response will include an id (hereafter referred to as consumer_id) that is used to uniquely identify this consumer. You should save this consumer_id, as you will need it in future requests.

{
  "data": {
    "id": "5cc227f6-e085-4179-9b7b-c623ead67a02",
    "attributes": {
      "name": "Michael Scott",
      "address": {
        "line1": "1725 Slough Avenue",
        "city": "Scranton",
        "state": "PA",
        "zipCode": "18503"
      },
      "dateOfBirth": "1964-03-15",
      "ssn": "XXX-XX-6789",
      "income": 78994
    }
  }
}

Step 2: Order Credit Data

After registering a consumer with Bloom, you must then Order Credit Data for the consumer.
See the guide for Ordering Dataguide for more information on this process.

Step 3: Fetch the consumer's data

Now that the consumer has been registered and successfully authenticated, you can begin to fetch their credit data. For example, to fetch the consumer's credit summary, send a GET request to /consumers/{consumer_id}/credit.bloom.summary using your saved consumer_id from the registration step.

{
  "method": "get",
  "url": "https://sandbox.bloom.dev/v1/consumers/{consumer_id}/credit.bloom.summary",
  "headers": {
    "Authorization": "Bearer <ACCESS_TOKEN>",
    "content-type": "application/json"
  }
}

{
  "data": {
    "type": "credit.bloom.summary",
    "attributes": {
      "openAccounts.count": 13,
      "closedAccounts.count": 13,
      "accounts.count": 25,
      "delinquentAccounts.count": 7,
      "derogatoryAccounts.count": 1,
      "balance.usd": 26855.01,
      "monthlyPayments.usd": 559.01,
      "inquiries.count": 8,
      "publicRecords.count": 0,
      "availableCredit.usd": 1658.01,
      "utilization.percent": 14.09,
      "oldestAccount.date": "1996-04-08",
      "creditAge.years": 23,
      "onTimePayment.percent": 55.99,
      "latePayment.percent": 44.01,
      "creditLimit.usd": 1930.01
    }
  }
}

202 responses when requesting data

If you receive a 202 response from any of the data endpoints, this means that the consumer's data is currently being retrieved. Generally, all consumer data is available within 30 seconds of successful authentication, and you can poll the endpoint after receiving a 202 response until you see a 200.

What's next

Check out the Data API documentation to explore and learn more about all the different types of credit data the Bloom offers, like:

• Credit report summary (credit.bloom.summary)
• Credit report accounts (credit.bloom.report.accounts)
• Credit report collection accounts (credit.bloom.report.collection)
• And more!

Check out the KBA guide for a more detailed guide into the KBA process.

Check out the Environments guide for a look into the different environments Bloom offers and learn how to effectively leverage the Sandbox environment.