2. There is an online dating service called CreditScoreDating.com for those who are concerned with the financial situation of a potential mate. The site’s motto is “Credit Scores Are Sexy.”

3. One in 4 unemployed Americans have been required to go through a credit check when they applied for a job. One in 10 has been denied a job due to information on their credit report.

4. On average, African-American and Latino households have worse credit scores than white households.

5. Not everyone has a credit history. If someone has never had a credit card, he or she will not have a credit or FICO score.

6. Occupations that regularly check an applicant’s credit score are 1) parking booth operator, 2) the military, 3) accounting, 4) mortgage loan originator, 5) Transportation Security Administrator (TSA), 6) law enforcement, and 7) temporary service positions.

7. As late as the mid-1990s, many South African credit scores considered the color of the borrower’s skin. Lower scores would be calculated for black consumers.

8. Credit scoring has been around for several decades, and by the end of the 1970s, most major lenders used some kind of credit scoring formula to decide whether to accept or reject applications.

9. The Bangladesh-based Grameen Bank uses gender in its credit scoring model and lends exclusively to women. Women are seen as more responsible borrowers than men.f

10. The widely used FICO (Fair Isaac Corporation) score is based on the work of engineer Bill Fair and mathematician Earl Isaac who founded the firm Fair Isaac in 1956. They developed the first credit bureau-based scoring system in the mid-1980s.

http://www.lbnelert.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/image0062.jpg11. The FICO score is based on the behavior of millions of borrowers. The model looks for patterns in behavior that indicates a borrower might default, as well as patterns that indicated a borrower is likely to pay.

12. Credit scoring is one of the reasons why consumer credit exploded in the 1990s. Lenders had more confidence lending to wider groups of people because they had a more precise tool for measuring risk. Scoring also allowed them to make decisions faster.

13. The total volume of consumer loans (credit cards, auto loans, and other non-mortgage debt) more than doubled between 1990 and 2000, to $1.7 trillion.

14. The amount of credit card debt outstanding rose nearly three-fold between 1990 and 2002, from $173 billion to $661 billion.

15. Home equity lending soared from $261 billion in 1993 to more than $1 trillion 10 years later.

16. Credit scoring got a huge boost in 1995 when the U.S.’s two largest mortgage-finance agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, recommended lenders use FICO credit scores. Their recommendation carried enormous weight in the home loan industry.

17. Initially, when consumers tried asking for more details about their FICO and credit scores, Fair Isaac, the leader in the credit-scoring world, wanted to keep how they calculated scores a secret. The company said it worried consumers wouldn’t understand the nuances of credit score or they would try to change their behaviors to boost their score. Finally, in 2000, they caved into pressure and listed 22 factors that affected a person’s score on their site. And in 2003, Congress passed a law that gave people a right to see their score.

18. In 2011, a portion of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill required lenders to disclose credit scores to applicants.

19. Credit scoring is rife with controversy, including vulnerability to errors. The rise in automated lending decisions, the billions of pieces of data handled each day, as well as the explosion of identity theft has left major rooms for error in scoring.

20. More than 8 million people fall victim to identity theft in the U.S. each year. Consumers spend hundreds of millions of hours trying to resolve the problem, stop the fraud, and clear up their credit reports.

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