First thing to explain is what a credit report and a credit bureau is. There are three big credit bureaus, called TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian, or TU,EQ, and EX for short. When you have credit card accounts, or loan accounts, with various banks, your banks will send information about your accounts to these three bureaus. Information about whether you have made late paymenys, how much you owe, etc,
All this information is eventually packed into a credit report. But there is usually too much. The ;lenders want some way to reduce all the pages of data to a single number, where high meant good guy and low meant bad guy. Enter a company called FICO. They make credit scoring models. Think of them as big compouter programs that take in a report and spit out that one final number., which is called a FICO score.
Trouble is, like a car conmpany, they make lots of models, that all do different things, So you have to know which model produced your score, but also which credit bureau they get your data from.
THe score you get from Discover uses a model called FICO 8 Classic. It is drawn on TU or EX data, depending which :"free FICO" program you are enrolled in.
THe one you get from Citi uses a very different model csllled FICO 8 Bankcard Preferred. and it draws on EQ data.
Now we got that clear, you can seen why the score would be differenrt,. THe data of the reports are different but also the model is different. Either one could make the score different, and toethger they could make the score very different.
