Free FICO Score Every Month: Why Financial Institutions Do It

[Anonymous]

I wonder if people who expect to see their free score around, say, the 15th of the month, upon discovering that it is not there, nor the 16th, nor the 17th, get anxious, and ask Discover, "Why is it taking so long this month?" And upon being told by Discover CSR that Discover has no control whatsoever of when it shows, customer calls FICO to learn why it is taking so long, and during the call, buys a "real" report. 

I wonder if this happens.

[tooleman694]

I am sure it happens all the time.

[Anonymous]

Do you think that it would happen much less if Discover/etc. showed the free credit score on the exact same day every month?

[tooleman694]

It would happen less if they offered the whole **bleep** report, most of the time I careless about the score.

[Anonymous]

LOL True.

On that note, my guess is that the banks are paying FICO for this service. The amount of detail of each "free" credit score varies from bank to bank. Since this information is coming from a single source (FICO), it stands to reason that FICO works out deals on a bank-by-bank basis. Furthermore, since info comes from Equifax/Experian/Trans-Union, each of these three will probably charge FICO their own fee. So three bureaus get paid by FICO. FICO gets paid by banks(?). FICO gets between $19 and $59 from the ocassional impatient customer who has been sufficiently teased with uncertainty from their free montly report.

[rbentley]

I find it intereting the different FICO scores that are used and disclosed and wonder why that is.  My local credit union (MACU) gives me a true FICO score every 60 days, but it is is FICO 2 (seriously????  FICO 2????)  Discover and Amex give FICO 8 while PenFed, NFCU and FNBO give out FICO 9 scores.  There must be some cost factor involved.

[tooleman694]

Oh I am sure they are paying Fico for this. I am a Systems Engineer and I setup systems like these for financial companies.

A lot of times companies offer services to other companies, and guys like me set them up. You have a backend process that gathers the information and then you have a scheduled process that sends the feed out to the customer. The customer then has their own backend process that takes the information from the feed and processes and imports into their systems.

My guess here is that there is one feed coming from a CRA, then it is processed by a system from Fico they have internally to give the score and then they release it on your profile on their site. Depending on the schedules on sending out the feed, schedules on processing the feed once recieved. Then you can have system problems, like the feed didn't go out, or never recieved. Or it errored out on either side. All can cause issues delaying it getting updated on your profile. Then you add in that this really isn't business critical, so its probably very low priority to get them updated.

[tooleman694]

The different Fico score offered could also be very political.

[Anonymous]

I am at an inflection-point for my credit score on Experian. 

As I mentioned, an inflection-point is any point where the customer is exceptionally interested in seeing his/her credit score. This inflection-point can be determined either by FICO by monitoring the credit score, and seeing that it is about to cross, say, the 700 mark, or by how often the customer clicks on the VIEW SCORE button at a participating financial institution. I figure that, if there is any validity to what I mentioned in the OP, there would be a "lag" between my "normal" credit-score-day-of-the-month and my "soon-to-be" credit-score-day-of-the-month, for this month, as rendered by Chase Bank. My "normal" day for Chase is the 4th. It is currently the 13th. That's a 9-day spread from normal.

We'll see how long it takes before FICO finally coughs-up my credit score to Chase.

[Anonymous]

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@tooleman694 wrote:

The different Fico score offered could also be very political.

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Can you expand on that a bit?  Democrats get one score, Republicans another, Libertarians a third, etc?  I'm unsure what you mean.