So my wife and I both subscribe to Credit Karma. We have both seen huge decreases (her Equifax -33pts) and increases (my Equifax - 20 pts) for no particular reason. Has anyone else noticed this. We also subscribe to FICO scores via our Discover card and BC accts. Have not seen these radical shifts in those venues.
Credit Karma uses VantageScore 3.0. It can be expected to differ from FICO quite a bit. It is a new generation of score that uses data not available or used in FICO scores prior to FICO 9. Because of the increased predictive nature of this new data VS3.0 ignores paid collections. FICO 9 also uses this new data and also ignores paid collections.. I expect FICO 9 will correlate a lot closer with VantageScore 3.0 but while FICO 9 is a released product, it is not available to consumers.
Neiither FICO 9 nor VantageScore 3.0 are widely used for lending decisions at this time.
The most significant aspect of the new data used in FICO 9 and VantageScore 3.0 is the payment's made on each account. Previously, only the balance was utlized in scoring. The payments made, relative to the minimum payment due and CL has been shown to be highly risk predictive according to a FICO banking blog posted about a year ago.
