[2] At the beginning of the 20th century, the Berlin city electric company (BEWAG) offered household appliances for sale on installment plans.

With the experience they gained from BEWAG, Walter and Kurt Meyer, along with Robert Kauffmann established the Schutzgemeinschaft für Absatzfinanzierung (English: Protective Association for Sales Financing) in 1927.

[5] Responding to Schufa’s expansion into new areas of business such as the housing and insurance sectors, as well as debt collection, the German Data Protection Office and several regional Data Protection Officers issued a joint press statement on 15 May 2003 in which they warned against the risk that Schufa was evolving into a privately controlled central database.

According to the joint press statement, each additional data source was moving ever closer “to a detailed Personality Profile of the individuals affected”[6] This would make a reality of the “transparent citizen”[7] In 2009 the German Ministry for Consumer Protection (Bundesverbraucherschutzministerium) undertook a study of the error rates of various credit bureaus, and identified a very high error rate at Schufa.

[8][9] Consumer watchdog Stiftung Warentest had already conducted an investigation in 2003 which concluded that many items (69%) of Schufa data were incomplete, out of date, or wrong.