Credit Card Score In Depth
Monday, June 14th, 2010In the United States, a credit card score is representative of the credit worthiness of a person looking to borrow money. Creditworthiness is defined as the likelihood of a person paying his or her debts. In the past the credit card score has been shown to be very accurate and has enabled lenders to make credits more widely available to the public at a much lower price than before the score was introduced.
The score itself is largely based on the statistical analysis of the borrower’s credit information as collected by one of the major American credit bureaus. The three major credit bureaus in America are Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. Another important company to know in this context is the Fair Isaac Corporation, also known as FICO. FICO created the first credit scoring system back in 1958 and followed this ground breaking invention with the introduction of the credit card score system in 1970. The latter system was first installed with the American Bank of Trust.
Credit card scores are often used by lenders to assess whether the person who wants to borrow money will pay back the debt or if the chance of bad debt is too high, thus effectively minimizing the chance of losses due to bad debt. Credit card scores are therefore used to first of all determine who qualifies for a loan, what is the credit limit and the interest rate.
Currently there are many different credit scores in use and thus one person might have more than one credit card score at the same time, due to the different scoring models used by each of the three large American credit bureaus. These different scoring models include, but are not limited to, the following: The FICO scoring model, NextGen, VantageScore or the CE Score.
In the United States the system of using credit card scores is widely recognized as being the most fair and by far the most objective system, as neither race, ethnicity or sex play any kind of role for the loan offer made. In addition to this, there have been studies that have shown a decrease in risk of bad debt and an increase in the availability of credit since implementing the credit card scoring system. In other studies, the evaluations and assessments based on each individual’s credit card score have proven to be very accurate and reliable, especially in the credit card industry.
