Seen in today’s Wall Street Journal (subscriber link):
The three major credit-reporting bureaus in the U.S. announced that they have created a single new consumer-credit score incorporating data from all three bureaus.
The credit-scoring system, called VantageScore initially will be marketed primarily to lenders, but officials of the three credit bureaus said that it will be made available in coming months directly to consumers interested in checking their credit scores through each of the bureaus, which are Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.[...]
The article goes on to mention that the Vantage algorithm is common to all three bureaus, but the phenomenon of generating a score one bureau at a time will continue, meaning that you would still see different scores from different bureaus by virtue of the bureaus having different data.
File this in the “isn’t that interesting” bucket. All three credit bureaus were increasingly marketing their in-house analytics teams back in the days when I worked the credit gig, and this would seem to be a further push on the mighty mother of all analytics entities, Fair Isaac.
I’d love to know what the back-story is here.
However, I don’t know that this in and of itself will necessarily change the credit-risk measuring landscape all that much. Fico scores are currently codified as the lowest common denominator in mortgage lending, for example, with formal standards measured by Fico scores being defined for federal support and mortgage securitization.
Outside mortgages, IIRC all of the big banks and many of the mid-sized banks have their own proprietary models used in deciding whether to accept/decline applications or in determining what interest rate you’re charged on your credit card balances. Even Fair Isaac has been marketing newer-generation models which have so far failed to eclipse Beacon/Empirica/FICA in the minds of consumers.