Credit bureau
A company that collects your credit history and sells reports to lenders. The three nationwide bureaus are Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.
Lenders send account and payment details to the credit bureaus, which assemble them into your credit report. Not every lender reports to all three, so your reports can differ.
You deal with each bureau directly to get your reports, dispute errors and place or lift a credit freeze. A fraud alert is the exception, since one bureau passes it to the others.