Stephanie Fierman - Marketing Observations Grown Daily

Stephanie Fierman Doesn’t Care For Fickle FICOs

Wednesday February 04th 2009, 3:55 pm
Filed under: customer service,financial services,Internet,US economy

Do you remember the 1970′s Fifth Dimension song, “One less… FICO to answer. One less… FICO to fry…” You don’t? Well you may start singing it when you go to collect your three FICO scores and discover only two available.

As of Valentine’s Day, Experian will no longer make its credit score, or FICO, available to individual consumers. So while you previously could have gone to myFICO.com and purchased any or all of three scores – from Experian, Equifax and TransUnion – there will now be only two.

Given what’s happening in the economy, it seems an odd time from a PR point of view to take such an action. Lenders are raising their credit standards, and a yes/no decision can sometimes come down to a matter of a few points on your FICO. If you are in the market for a loan, you want to see all the same information that lender is seeing: particularly because individuals often find errors in their credit records that must be corrected.

The stakes are particularly high because Experian itself will continue to sell (your) FICO scores based on its data to lenders, such as banks. This means that the lending institution will see a score that you can no longer see for yourself.

Fair Isaac expressed surprise at the action at a time when consumers are particularly “concerned about their credit standing.” Of course, there is some competition between all these parties, and Fair Isaac actually sued Experian in 2006 on an unrelated matter. That lawsuit is still outstanding, which probably doesn’t exactly create a spirit of cooperation between the two firms.

If you are in the market for a loan or credit card, I would recommend buying your Experian-based FICO score while you still can. And always pull your other FICOs once a year for free at www.annualcreditreport.com.

FICO credit_score Fair_Isaac Equifax Experian