Potential downside should also be considered by the party being added as an AU.
While they can obtain an artificial score improvement based on having history of another included n their credit report, and thus scoring, it is not their history.
While some creditors do not do a detailed manual review and may rely only or primarily on credit score in their decision making, if a creditor does a manual review and sees an AU reporting, that automatically informs them that your score is not representative of only that consumer's own histiory. They have no way to back out the AU account and produce a score that represents ony the risk of the that consumer.
Adding AUs can be helpful in building or rebuilding when the credit being sought is small, and thus manual review is not as likely.
However, as one moves up the application chain, they may wish to remove AUs, and thus have a score that is representative of their own history.
