In late April U.S Bank announced that they would no longer be giving cardholders access to their Experian FAKO score for free, Experian also sent out e-mails to people who had enrolled in this service to let them know they could pay for this service. U.S Bank said that they would be replacing this with another score, but didn’t mention whether it would be a free FICO score or another scoring model.
Cardholders can now sign up for this new free credit score and monitoring from U.S Bank, unfortunately it’s not good news. They will be providing you with a free TransUnion Vantage 3.0 score. The reason that this is not good news, is that this is probably the most common free score you can get. For example, Credit Karma, WisePiggy & Credit Sesame all offer this exact score for free as well and also provide other benefits. The score is updated monthly.
Personally I find this offering utterly worthless, providing a FAKO score is simply not good enough of a benefit anymore when it’s so easy to already get these scores for free. If credit card issuers want to offer a free score, it needs to be a FICO score to remain competitive and actually be a feature that cardholders can get value out of. I hope American Express are listening…
