All posts by FICO

FICO and global financial dignity and economic empowerment nonprofit, Operation HOPE, partnered a little over a year ago to help empower consumers through financial literacy. The program enables Operation Hope coaches at more than 100 HOPE Inside locations across the U.S. to share FICO® Scores with clients for free and to provide key insights to enable them to better understand their financial health. We recently had the opportunity to speak at the annual 2018 HOPE Global Forum.  At the event, we conducted a survey of attendees during our panel, ‘Unleashing Credit: Credit for the Poor Reimagined,’ to examine the barriers to credit.  Among the results from the survey, FICO found that the top drivers of credit barriers include debt-to-income ratio (93%), restrictive lending standards (84%), and gaps in financial literacy (80%). The survey results reinforce the ongoing need to help support personalized financial education and coaching.  We look forward to... [Read More]

In our previous blog post, FICO revealed research on the credit behavior of young people with a student loan actively in repayment to determine the behaviors that are driving FICO® Score increases and decreases.  Using a nationally representative sample, we identified 10 million scorable consumers age 18 to 30 who had a student loan actively in repayment as of October 2016. To better understand the financial actions driving the “FICO Score increaser” and the “FICO Score decreaser” populations, we looked at the credit behaviors of these two groups across a variety of dimensions such as amounts owed, on-time payments, and searches for new credit. Below is an infographic which provides a more visual representation of our findings.