Most countries in the world today have some kind of centralized repository for credit data. But this data exists in silos, cut off from the rest of the world. For immigrants moving to a different country this has been a real problem. A doctor with a 20-year credit history earning $250,000 a year in, say, Australia is treated as a thin file/no file credit applicant in the U.S. and is rejected for a credit card with a $500 limit. This makes no sense.
The way we have stored and used credit information has not fundamentally changed in decades. The big three credit bureaus each have massive databases of personal information on everyone with a credit file. But as we have seen in recent years this is not the best and certainly not the most secure system.