ScaredCrow, and Credit08, welcome to the mass world of credit scoring confusion!
Yup, there is the Classic Coke FICO, the auto-enhanced FICO, the bank-card enhanced FICO.
And to add to the confusion, each CRA purchases its own version of the "real" FICO scoring algorithm, so even with identical CRs with each of the three different CRAs, you FICO score with each will be different because of inherent differences in the mathematical algorithm through which their data is run. The only commonality is that each of the algorithms were developed by FairIsaac, and thus can brand themselves as FICO scores. But FairIsaac does not sell only vanilla algorithms.
Classic FICO is what most mortgage lendors use, so is the generally recognized standard, and what you buy on myFICO.
And to really make your head spin, competitors other than FairIsaac are also in the capitalist arena, trying to market and sell their own scores, based on their own scoring algorithns. Many on here call these scores FAKOS. The three CRAs banded together and developed their own scoring algorithm, called Vantage, to compete with FICO. They are now in litigation over the intellectual property violation of trade secrets shared in the past, so it is not only a consumer nightmare, but a legal nightmare. Amongst all of the current confusion, FairIsaac has recentyly announced that it will release even more versions...one based on medical risk scoring, and the other based on major revisions that it is calling FICO 08.
The only thing that a consumer can do is to ask the future lendor which credit score it is using in its decision making. The safest bet is that it will be classic FICO, but it is a tangled web they weave, and FICO is NOT a single score.
What goes into a credit report is regulated under the FCRA. But scoring based on what is in a CR is not generally regulated, for credit scoring models and agorithms are closely guarded business trade secrets, and not regulated except as to not score on such prohibited factors such as age, sex, race, national origin, etc. The rest are mysteries of the unregulated capitalists.
Message Edited by RobertEG on
05-05-2008 06:38 PMMessage Edited by RobertEG on
05-05-2008 06:39 PMMessage Edited by RobertEG on
05-05-2008 06:52 PM