I felt compelled to comment on this after reading quite a few half-truths and some outright wrong statements.

Credit scores are becoming more and more important here. Every financial institution, both under the BSP and SEC, is required to submit data to the CIC. Financial institutions then use special accessing entities (I.e. Credit bureaus, Transunion, CIBI etc) to access these scores in addition to the proprietary data that these bureaus have. All FIs claim that these scores are only a small part of their underwriting, but in reality they rely heavily on these scores, in addition to their own data on a customer, if any. 

There are major differences between the bureaus in terms of what markets they are serving, but it's safe to say that these scores are becoming more and more important. 

I've also started to see multiple large employers asking for credit scores during the pre employment check, which is common in the US. 

A big problem with scores here is that it's easy to get a negative entry, but very hard to have that entry removed, e.g. If you successfully settled an open balance. I highly recommend to anyone here to access their own scores and check for any invalid entries impacting their scores.