@iced wrote:
Just speculation, but...
I don’t like monopolies. Maybe American Express doesn’t either. There’s nothing wrong with VS per se, but its low adoption/use rate is why it’s “worthless.” That’s never going to change if every bank and creditor continues to ignore or dismiss VS to worship FICO and hand over cash because they have to.
Perhaps American Express thought if they jump in and put some evangelizing in, a few others might, too. Maybe they can lead the charge on getting a second scoring model going. They are a bigger fish in the pond, after all. If they succeed, they can devalue FICO a bit, which in turn gives all the other captive customers that FICO has an alternative to being captive customers.
More than likely, they were approached by the bureaus and offered some sort of deal. People like to bag on vantagescore and call it an educational score, but it was designed to compete with fico. And yes, banks use them. Chase would pull a vantagescore along with ficos when I worked there and occasionally, you may receive a denial letter with the vantagescore on it from them. I did, from southwest a few years back.
