Experian giveth, and Experian taketh away...

[shipo]

I've been tracking my various credit scores on the three main service bureaus and Experian is both by far the lowest and also by far the most volatile. In the last six days, during which I don't think anything of note has happened to me from a credit perspective, Experian bumped my FICO 8 score from 613 to 625, and then today they sliced that bump off and more by dropping me to 607; all with no explanation for either the increase or the even larger decrease.

Yes I know FICO 8 calculations is a bit of a black art, but yeesh, this is bizarre. FWIW, my TransUnion and Equifax scores are in the 720 range, over 100 points higher than Experian.

One other item of annoyance from the Experian experience; I get page after page of upgrade requests for their services (either for a monthly payment or in exchange for me providing my bank account information) which seem to indicate if I do that, my credit rating will be bumped. Neither sound like a good idea to me.

[sophieanne]

shipo -I totally hear and agree with you. I use the Experian free app and get monthly reports from them. I asked them once why I would want to give them my banking info (which they would use to access your account to scan for payment history) after they had one of the biggest data breaches!! I don’t need a few extra points that badly 😀

[justbroke]

Experian is the worse. Many have complained that they have identical trade lines between the 3 bureaus, yet only Experian has a different and lower score. It may have to do with how they label things (status, account type, etc), but one would think that if FICO scores Equifax and Transunion nearly the same (when they have the same information) why can't that be done with Experian.

Yes, the scores are strange and I don't even think that Fair Isaac even understands FICO. I don't know if it's machine learning (ML) at this point, but eventually the algorithm will change. Maybe they only use ML to determine the next scoring model. FICO 09 will be mainstream at some point as it is already infiltrating some smaller banks.