@Anonymous wrote:
Yea so on credit karma when I click on TU it doesnt have any history. It only has history on EQ. I do have a FICO score. But do lenders use FICO or Vantage or one of EX EQ or TU? I always thought they pulled one of the 3 to decide.
EX, EQ, and TU (Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion) are not credit scores. They are credit bureaus. A credit bureau is like a warehouse where all the credit information about you is stored. The bureau produces a summary of this information called a report, which includes a listing of every account you have, closed or open.
When a creditor tries to make decisions about your risk level, they pull a report from at least one bureau. The creditor might even pull a report at all three bureaus.
But it is hard for creditors to make sense out of the reports in a consistent fashion. So it is easier for them to feed that report into a credit scoring algorithm, which takes all the info on that report and turns it into a single 3-digit number. The creditor then has its own set of internal policies for evaluating that single number.
FICO makes a bunch of credit scoring models. VantageScore makes two (3.0 and 4.0). Almost no lenders or CC issuers use Vantage.
The upshot of all this is that if you apply for a Citi card (say) they will pick one of FICO's many scoring models and pick one of the three bureaus and then feed the data from that bureau into that scoring model and get a number. EQ, EX, or TU is the place that houses the data; the FICO model is the computer program that turns the data into a single number.
