Three fintechs joined forces today to create a new credit scoring technology designed for thin-file customers. Experian, FICO, and Finicity are the triumvirate behind the new score, named the UltraFICO score.
The UltraFICO score leverages consumer-permissioned account data aggregated and distributed by Experian and Finicity. Unlike the traditional FICO score, which relies heavily on repayment data from users’ previous credit usage, UltraFICO looks at how responsibly consumers manage their finances. After gaining the user’s permission to access their bank statements, Finicity’s technology pulls consumer-contributed data from their checking, savings, and money market accounts, examining the length of time accounts have been open, frequency of activity, and saving data.
Accessing the additional data not only offers lenders a more complete picture of the prospective borrower’s ability to repay, it also improves access to credit for Americans who are typically below lenders’ preferred credit score threshold. This especially applies to thin-file borrowers and those working on rebuilding their score after a financial crisis.
UltraFICO will be piloted in 2019 to test the new model and determine consumers’ willingness to share their financial data. The group plans to make the new model generally available to lenders in mid-2019.
Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, Experian most recently demoed its decisioning platform at FinovateFall 2018. The cloud-based platform enables organizations to combine data and analytics to improve the accuracy of their customer lending decisions. Earlier this year, Experian acquired U.K.-based ClearScore for $385 million.
Founded in 1956 as Fair Isaac Corporation, FICO presented “Rapidly Deliver Contextually-Powered Stream Processing” at FinDEVr New York 2016. Earlier this month, the company announced it will provide KYC and onboarding solutions for Belarus-based lender, Belgazprombank.
Utah-based Finicity demoed at FinovateFall 2017 where the company’s Co-founder and President of Data Services, Nick Thomas, showed how the company simplified access to its Verification of Income and Verification of Assets reports. Frequently in the headlines, Finicity announced last week it was selected as third-party service provider for Freddie Mac’s automated income and asset assessment solution, Loan Product Advisor. In September, the company aligned with intelligent process automation software provider Capsilon to modernize the mortgage origination process.
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