Word: creditably
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Lenders are rethinking their reliance on credit scores. In the past year, an increasing number of banks have begun turning to court documents, phone bills and other nontraditional ways of measuring creditworthiness to bolster their lending decisions. The shift comes at a time when the financial industry is suffering from a record number of loan defaults, particularly in the mortgage business. Industry experts say the widely used credit scores, the most famous of which is called the FICO, have not proved as effective in ferreting out bad borrowers as many lenders had anticipated. (Read TIME's "Bailout Report Card...
...experience we have seen in the past year only reiterates that you need to do more than just look at a credit score when making a loan," says Larry Goldstone, chief executive of Thornburg Mortgage. "We have never had as much confidence in credit scores as the rest of the industry...
...Companies that provide so-called alternative credit information say their business is booming, even as the rest of the lending industry continues to shrink. Banks once sought out such information as rent-payment histories to assess whether to lend to individuals who lack a credit score because they may never have had a credit card or mortgage and don't have enough credit history to generate a rating. These days, more and more banks are using the supplemental information, even with customers who have a credit score, in an effort to lower loan defaults...
...have had very solid growth this year," says Thomas Brown, vice president of financial services at LexisNexis, who also helps run RiskView, a service that uses such public filings as court records and property deeds to assess credit risk. "Our data [are] being seen as useful by a wider variety of lenders...
...Credit scores, first developed in the late 1950s, try to boil down to a single number whether a person is likely to pay back a loan. The most widely used ranking of individual creditworthiness is the FICO score. Fair Isaac Corp., which computes the number, won't say exactly what goes into the formula, but it is essentially a summation of an individual's credit history - which loans were paid off and which weren't - rolled up into a three-digit number between 300 and 850. The higher the number, the more likely you are to pay back a loan...