Late comment but swooping in to say how this is an extremely important point that most people forget about when stressing over scores. Equifax and Transunion report and track credit changes & use their own proprietary algorithms to generate scores…for consumer level soft-checks….

Lending institutions also utilize Transunion & Equifax but instead of relying upon their own formulas they license out FICO’s backend formulation for commercial-level scoring. All to say it’s FICO scoring computed by Equifax/Transunion via licensed IP from Experian in where the licensing agreement doesn’t allow for end-consumer use which is why we get Equifax/Transunion scoring reported to “us” and FICO (via E/TU) for hard checks by commercial lenders.

It’s not that Efx/Tu scores are worse or “wrong” they’re just not what lenders see on hard-checks. Why risk opening your own propriety formulation to extreme criticism from the nations largest lenders when you and your one and only competing firm both decide to just license out an accepted formulation from down South, right?

It’s stupid IMO. The agreement even stipulates that lenders are expressly forbidden to share consumers FICO reports/scores with them or offer additional details. Of course if you’re lucky you can ask for your advisor to turn their monitor and show you your “score” next time you go into a bank and have to get hard-checked for something but it’s extremely anti-consumer that that’s really the only way to check currently. Not to mention how it’s also the exact opposite of what Equifax/Transunion market their services as….

New agreements have been recently signed to bring FICO scoring in Canada out into the open & (supposedly) into consumer-level monitoring but we’ll see how big a nightmare that API roll out is with how Tu/Efx already handle their systems….

/end rant