I recently used two seperate credit monitoring services and received two different scores.?

Question

Both were based on my Experian Credit report. Citibank monitoring scored my Experian Score at 609 but Creditreport.com scored Experian at 651. This was only within a weeks time and nothing had changed on my report. How do I know what score a potential lender would see? How do I find out the most accurate scoring info?

Answer 1

You are not going to like this answer: Neither.

A potential lender is going to get EXPERION's score, if they choose to buy it, not creditreport.com's and not citibank's.

The purpose of a credit score is to give some prediction of your probability of repayment. The credit bureau report will contain facts. The score is an interpretation of those facts. Every credit analyst will have a different opinion on how predictive a certain fact is and thus how many points to add or take away because of it. Experion has spent a lot developing their formula, or has licensed it from some analytical firm, like Fair Isaacs, for a lot of money. They're not going to give it away. What you are seeing is citibank's formula processing Experion's data, not the output of Experion's formula.

There is another possibility: where I work, our mathematicians have created our own formula and we score the reports ourselves. We don't think that commersial scores predict retail revolving charge very well. Any lender can do this. And no, I'm not going to tell you what's in it. The reason these are confidential is to prevent people from gaming the system.

Answer 2

Credit scores change daily.

Add to this that all three credit bureaus have their own way of calculating your score and the fact that there are three different types of bureaus (regular, auto enhanced and factual) and you begin to understand how it's possible for scores to vary by 100-points.

When you look at your credit or apply for a credit card you see the regular report. When you buy a car the lenders see the auto enhanced report. When you buy a home the mortgage companies see the factual report.

One person has nine different scores depending on which bureau is looked at and which report is pulled.

Answer 3

You make it sound like the Credit report is based on some absolute requirement that everyone is required to use. When you look at any one of the three reporting services you will see there are dozens of entries. If one monitoring service says your score is most importantly based on recent activity and the other says it should be based on average, you will get different scores - that is why emphasizing the credit score is going to mess a lot of people up.

Answer 4

That's normal. Each has minor differences in how they calculate score. Many potential lenders get a 3 scores and average them.