topic Re: These credit scores make no sense! in Understanding FICO® Scoring

These credit scores make no sense!

Anonymous — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 13:01:22 GMT

As I shared before I recently bought a car using Capital One finance. My goal is to pay on time for a year and then refinance it.

The problem though is this. I tried to get a credit line increase with my Capitol One card and they said no. I received a letter in the mail from them. I took a look at the back of the letter and it said my credit score through Equifax is 587. However the paid Experian credit monitoring that I have says my Equifax is 635. Why am I getting conflicting scores?

Re: These credit scores make no sense!

Anonymous — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 13:48:23 GMT

They are likely using different scoring models. FICOs come in many flavors, from auto scores to credit card scores to mortgage scores. It can get very confusing. Check out How Fico Scores Work on this forum. It will help clear up a lot of confusion.

Eta link https://ficoforums.myfico.com/t5/Understanding-FICO-Scoring/bd-p/ficoscoring

Re: These credit scores make no sense!

FireMedic1 — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 14:00:14 GMT

You were approved for your car with a FICO Auto Score and denied for a CLI from a FICO 8 or mortgage score. Cant remember which one it is for CLI's. There's like 20 versions.

Example:

Re: These credit scores make no sense!

gdale6 — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 14:22:09 GMT

If that letter doesnt say its a Fico score its either Vantage 3.0 or their own internal model.

Re: These credit scores make no sense!

SouthJamaica — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 15:09:04 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
As I shared before I recently bought a car using Capital One finance. My goal is to pay on time for a year and then refinance it.

The problem though is this. I tried to get a credit line increase with my Capitol One card and they said no. I received a letter in the mail from them. I took a look at the back of the letter and it said my credit score through Equifax is 587. However the paid Experian credit monitoring that I have says my Equifax is 635. Why am I getting conflicting scores?

In my experience Capital One has always used EQ FICO 5.

Re: These credit scores make no sense!

HeavenOhio — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 06:06:22 GMT

Yeah, it's the classic Equifax FICO 5, aka Equifax FICO 04. It's the same score that's used for mortgages.

Re: These credit scores make no sense!

KJinNC — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 20:23:30 GMT

As others have indicated, it makes sense on one level. Although from a broader point of view, I wonder if FICO comes up with all of these formulas mainly for marketing purposes, rather than because they're actually better at serving customers (meaning lenders). How likely is someone to be, say, a bad risk for a credit card but a good risk for a car? And in any case, lenders look at the profile, not just the score, so they could easily add weight to any factors they're interested in themselves, without needing a special score to do it. But, hey, there's a reason FICO dominates this market and I do not.

Anyway, you have many FICO scores for each bureau, as well as a VantageScore, and some companies create their own proprietary scores. That is almost certainly the reason for the discrepency you noticed. Though, it's honestly not that big a difference (both are subprime). Right now, my Experian FICO 8 is 756, my Experian Bankcard 2 is 642.