AU Discrepancy

[Anonymous]

I've posted about this before slightly - it seems my fico score from Transunion and Experian are not considering 3 au accounts (Equifax haven't looked at). It appears that these accounts are being reported since they are my report, but only my Discover card shows up in the details of the fico score. My vantage scores correctly account for the three au accounts. Has some policy changed? They are my parents' account and under the same address. These are all Chase FU if it matters.

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:
I've posted about this before slightly - it seems my fico score from Transunion and Experian are not considering 3 au accounts (Equifax haven't looked at). It appears that these accounts are being reported since they are my report, but only my Discover card shows up in the details of the fico score. My vantage scores correctly account for the three au accounts. Has some policy changed? They are my parents' account and under the same address. These are all Chase FU if it matters.

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Can you tell us more about why you think that FICO is ignoring those three AU cards?  It's quite possible that FICO 8 or FICO 9 might do that, but I am curious what in particular is making you think that is the case.

Also bear in that there are many different FICO models.  FICO 98 and FICO 04 tend to count all AU cards.  FICO 8 and 9 sometimes do not.  You refer to your "FICO score" without indicating the model.

Are these the only AU cards on your reports?

[Anonymous]

Sure: the main reason I think that my FICO 8 scores are ignoring AU accounts is that for Discover Scorecard (and Experian's website) and within my Discover Card account, the portion under score factors that relates to total number of accounts/utilization only ever show the Discover card that is under my name. This is despite the fact that on Experian and other monitoring websites, the correct four accounts show up on the "credit report" area of the website but not the score section, if that makes sense. For websites that give VS scores, the accounts show up properly on both the "score" and "report" sections. Image attached to show what I mean:

I only have four accounts in total: Discover, 3 Chase AUs.

[Anonymous]

Yeah, I thought might be it.  Well, the thing is, the front-end summary page of a credit monitoring tool doesn't necessarily reflect what the scoring algorithm is doing on the back end.

For example, the front end summary page for Credit Karma clearly implies that Vantage Score ignores all your closed accounts for age, which is not actually what Vantage does.

The same thing applies to the front-end summary page for FICO-based tools.  For example, some summary pages will tell you that you have 0% utilization when you have a small positive balance on one card and all other cards at $0.  The actual scoring algorithm rounds up so it views a 0.2% utilization as 1%, but the front end summary might round it to the nearest number.  If your utilization was actually 0% FICO would penalize you. 

Now it is quite possible that FICO is ignoring the AU cards.  But you can't know based on what the summary page says.

We can suggest a pretty simple test that you can do.  Have the card that is in your name report a small positive balance and at least one of the AU cards also report a balance.  Do that for a couple months and watch your scores.  Then pay the card in your name to $0 (while the AU card continues to report a positive balance) and see what happens to your score.  If your score drops at least 10 points, it means your AU card was not being counted by FICO 8.

[Anonymous]

Ah, what the user sees does not always represent what the algorithm calculates. Would this extend so far as to the show such a drastically different total utilization percent and debt when there is supposedly only one account ($42 - 8%) vs all accounts ($1,150 - 7%) in the user interface of the monitoring system? This is basically what is happening in different areas of the Experian site. So, the FICO score is the most important, and other information might not accurately reflect how it affected the end score.