After the rash of articles this past weekend on th new wave of credit boosting services being offered over the internet, Fair Isaac Corp. announced that it will adjust its FICO scoring formula in a way that will remove authorized user accounts from consideration by the scoring model. This change will take place in FICO 08, which is exected to become available to lenders in September. This action is intended to ensure the continued reliability and predictive power of FICO scores and protect lenders and FICO scores from abuse of authorized user credit card accounts by a new kind of credit repair service that sells consumer credit card histories to credit applicants in order to purposefully misrepresent the applicants' own credit history to lenders and other businesses.
"We will do whatever it takes to protect the reliability and accuracy of FICO credit scores for lenders, and to ensure lenders can continue to use FICO scores with confidence when making their most important customer decisions," said Dr. Mark Greene, CEO of Fair Isaac. "We will continue working with lenders, regulators and others in the credit reporting industry to end deceptive practices that fraudulently misrepresent consumer credit histories for profit."
An authorized user is a person permitted by a credit account holder to use an account, typically a family member who is managing credit for the first time. Used legitimately, authorized user account information has helped both lenders and consumers by enabling lenders to use FICO scores when making credit decisions for consumers who are starting to establish a credit history. Fair Isaac's research indicates that the next version of its FICO scoring formula will deliver increased predictive power without considering authorized user accounts.
Fair Isaac will work closely with lenders to help them implement and benefit from the FICO 08 score as it becomes available. As the company announced previously, lenders will be able to use the new version of FICO scores with minimal changes to their own operating systems. To make lender adoption easier and faster, the new scoring model will retain the same scoring range, score reason codes, minimum scoring criteria, inquiry treatment, and related model parameters as previous versions of the FICO formula.
Rachel Dollar, the editor of Mortgage Fraud Blog is an attorney and Certified Mortgage Banker who handles litigation for lending institutions and secondary market investors.