True Or False, FICO Is The Most Commonly Used Credit Score In The United States?

Question:

Hi, Doctor.

We are a group of students in North Dakota and we have a question for you. It’s a true or false one. Is the FICO score the most commonly used credit score in the United States of America? – Grade 5 class from North Dakota

Answer:

Thanks for the question kids. It’s great to see more teachers becoming pro-active in teaching their students about credit.

Yours is an interesting question. The first thing we need to do is determine who is the primary user of credit scores. Consumers or creditors? Lots of consumers check their credit scores before applying for loans, but almost EVERY creditor will look at least one credit score when either approving or denying somebody for a credit application.

This leads me to believe that creditors are the primary users of credit scores. FICO has stated multiple times that their FICO score is used in 90% of lending decisions.¹ This means that if 100 applications for a credit are made, 90 of those applications will involve the the credit looking at the applicants FICO score.

The other credit score that lenders look at is what’s known as the VantageScore. VantageScore was developed by the three credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian & TransUnion) as a way to compete with the FICO score.

In 2006 VantageScore took FICO to court, as part of that court case documents presented showed that VantageScore had less than 6% of the market share.

Other scores such as the PLUS score and creditXpert score aren’t used by lenders and thus have an even smaller market share.

This makes us believe that FICO score is the most commonly used score in the United States. So the original answer to your question is TRUE.