It works both ways, however. Fair Isaac can just say, "well, we'll just charge you even more to use our forumla". In turn, the big three develop (and have developed, mind you) FACO forumlas that work very similar to FICO's own and use little or no Fair Isaac derived data. In turn, FICO charges even more. And then VantageScore shows up and competes with FICO.
So yeah, either way you look at it, FI is getting screwed, the consumers are getting potentially screwed (and potentially benefited due to competition in this market), and the big three profit due to racketeering and conspiracy.
So, yeah, at some level we'll never see a product that monitors all three scores this cheaply (ie, $20-$25 a month) short of just pulling all three reports once a month (which is like $32 depending on who you buy from).
And the sad part is, I'm on FI's side here. They simply made a few formulas that can describe how credit worthy you are... its the big three that let lending banks do stuff like refuse to report CL (instead they report highest recent balance, or $0) or refuse to accurately report current balances, or just randomly throw lines of credit and collection notices on your account without even minimally identifying if you're that person (many cases of error you're obviously not the right person and don't match any possible way, even a computer could figure this out).
So yeah, I don't like CRAs. The least they could do is pull their heads out of the sand to accept my money.
