The score drop you experienced is the new account penalty and, likely, reduction in your aaoa. Only time (a year) with no new accounts can reverse either. If you had no other accounts less than a year old at the time your new accounts reported, then you also experienced a score card reassignment.
Your citi card is giving you your EQ FICO Bankcard 8 score, which is an industry version of FICO different from your FICO 8 Classic score.
CK is providing scores of the Vantage 3 model which is wholly different from the FICO model and thus, cannot be compared. It is common for Vantage and FICO to differ by as much as +/- 100 points.
The majority of lenders use FICO to make credit decisions. We only know of one (Synchrony) utilizing Vantage and they use Vantage 4, not 3.
You have a total of 28 FICO scores, incl. FICO 8, FICO 9, Mortgage, Auto, and Bankcard industry versions. A lender may use any one of those (tho FICO 8 is most common). It is a good idea to check the disclosures or the FAQ to determine which score model is being provided to you by a lender or other service to avoid confusion.
Welcome to the forums!
@Anonymous wrote:I recently had a credit score of 780 and regrettably opened up 2 new credit cards. I now have 3 credit cards and my credit score went down to 741. I am going to apply for a few lease soon and my score will probably get dinged again for another hard pull. Question is how can I get my score back up to the 780 range or higher. I have 100% payment history and roughly 6% utilization rate. My average of of accounts is now 2 years and have 4 accounts open. Please let me know if there is anything I can do other than wait for the inquiries to fall off. In addition, another thing that has been worrying me is my Citi card shows a lower FICO score than my other card and my Credit Karma score, not sure if this is normal. Appreciate the time and help.
Hi and welcome to the forums! The inquiries will sit on your credit reports for 2 years, however they will cease to in any way affect your scores after 1 year. If your are on a clean scorecard (meaning like you said with no missed payments among other things) you will likely have a small penalty for new accounts being opened within the last 1 year (this is typically a small penalty but can vary.) When you open new accounts that affect your account age, and average total age like you mentioned, that can also cause you to cross aging thresholds in turn causing other dips. The only way to gain the FULL amount of points back at this point is more time. NOW, Credit Karma uses a scoring model known as Vantage Score 3.0. It is meaningless in any lending decisions and cannot be compared to FICO scores which is what your lenders will be using. There are I believe 28 different versions of FICO currently. The one Citi uses is specifically Equifax enhanced Bankcard score 8. Most of the time when people refer to their scores around the forums, they are referring to classic FICO 8. When applying for an auto lease, it is likely the score they'll be using now days is FICO auto 8, which can be different than classic 8 and all of the other versions. (Confusing, right?) Your best course of action to maximize all scores is to let all cards except for 1 report in with a 0 balance, then let 1 card (a major bankcard, non-Chase or Synchrony backed) report in at less than 9%. This will allow for your maximum potential scores at this time. Stick around and ask as many questions as you want, there are a ton of incredibly knowledgeable people around here that are very happy to help in any way they can! 
ETA: lol @thornback with the lightning typing! Beat me to it.
@Ficoproblems247 haha... glad you offered the azeo info for score optimization tho - I forgot about that in my mad dash to post 1st 😆
@Anonymous Another thing to keep in mind also is if you are leasing vs financing and that honestly your AUTO score will reflect differently than your Bank scores, if you are over 700 you are sitting in a good position. If you are over 750 of course that is more ideal but you don't have to hit 780 to make a 'much better difference' than that 750. Just food for thought on the Bank Scores. ^^ Your UTL is great and perfect payments is another good thing but they will look into if you have any Vehicle History or will this be your First Car Loan?!
