Fair Isaac teams with Irish Credit Bureau to launch Global FICO score

The initiative provides the first credit bureau risk score for lenders in Ireland that combines Fair Isaac's proven analytic capabilities with the Irish Credit Bureau's electronic library of consumer credit data.

Global FICO score applies Fair Isaac's industry-standard FICO credit risk scoring technology to rank-order consumers according to their credit risk. The innovative score helps lenders sharpen their evaluation of consumer risk, automate their decision processes and increase their profitability. Designed to be consistently scaled across credit bureaus and across national borders, Global FICO score can be rapidly deployed in any country with credit bureau data.

"Global FICO score is now readily available to ICB members," said Seamus O Tighearnaigh, CEO of Irish Credit Bureau Limited. "By combining Fair Isaac's expertise in analytics with our extensive database, Global FICO credit risk scores enable members to increase their control of credit risk and consequently improve their costs and their profits."

"As the first global standard for consumer credit risk assessment, the Global FICO score is rapidly being adopted by regional lenders and by multinational financial institutions to ensure consistent portfolio management across local, regional and even global portfolios," said Brian Cooper, senior director of Credit Bureaus and Scoring at Fair Isaac. "Now that the Irish Credit Bureau is offering Global FICO score to its members, lenders throughout Ireland can immediately enjoy the benefits it brings to decisions throughout the customer credit lifecycle."

The Irish Credit Bureau and Fair Isaac have performed exhaustive testing of Global FICO score on ICB data. The Global FICO score demonstrated that it is a powerful and versatile credit risk score.

• Consistently rank-orders by account risk - Global FICO score consistently assigns lower scores to consumers who later have more delinquencies and charge-offs, while it gives higher scores to consumers who later have fewer delinquencies and charge-offs.
• Encompasses full spectrum of consumers - In testing, the Global FICO score has demonstrated a strong and consistent capability to separate consumers across the full score range according to their credit risk, providing lenders with real flexibility for closely managing risk.
• Supports responsible lending practices - Global FICO score deeply scrutinizes the consumer's existing debt levels to further enable lenders to support responsible lending practices. In addition, scores are accompanied by score-reason codes to enable easy explanation of the reason(s) that the consumer scored less than the maximum score.