Some information on automated credit profiling

One thing that is not understood by many consumers is their credit score -- what it means and what to do about it. The reality is that there are literally hundreds of different scoring products that can be used. In most cases, the higher the number, the better. However, there are exceptions; there is even at least one credit score that reflects the chances of defaulting on a loan, so the lower the number the better.

The most widely used company in credit scoring if the Fair, Isssc company. Their main product for all three bureaus is reported as follows: For Experian, it is the FICO or Fair, Isaac score. TransUnion refers to this as an Empirica score, and on Equifax it is known as Beacon. All three terms refer to scoring done by the same company (Fair, Isaac) with the information individually generated by each credit reporting agency.

The CRA's are now providing access to models of scoring and providing a comparative score with each individual report. This will allow someone to see their relative strengths and weaknesses as they are reported to the credit data repositories. Only one of them, however, provides the exact same score that a bank would receive if using this scoring model; that is Equifax's MyFico product.