Fair Isaac shares fell to $932.26 after the FHFA moved to open mortgage credit scoring to a rival, and new data show how thin that rival's actual adoption still is.
Fair Isaac shares fell 16.68% last Friday, from a Thursday close of $1,118.93 to $932.26, after the Federal Housing Finance Agency moved to loosen FICO's grip on mortgage credit scoring. Today is the first full trading session since that action, the first real test of whether the selloff holds.
The FHFA's move opens the door to VantageScore, the credit-scoring model jointly owned by Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, as an alternative to FICO in the mortgage market FICO has long dominated. Equifax CEO Mark Begor has said his company will hold VantageScore 4.0's price at $1 through 2027 and that Equifax makes no margin on FICO mortgage scores, framing the shift as a potential $1 billion annual industry-wide cost savings.
Adoption data released this year show that opportunity is still mostly theoretical. About 1,200 additional lenders began pulling free VantageScore reports alongside paid FICO scores in the second quarter, and roughly 100 lenders have fully transitioned, with 2.2 million VantageScore mortgage pulls in the quarter, nearly three times the first quarter's pace. But analyst Bose George put VantageScore 4.0's actual share of mortgages at just 4.4% as of July, concentrated almost entirely at two lenders, UWM and Rocket.
That gap, between a political and regulatory push moving quickly and actual lender adoption moving slowly, is the central tension in FICO's selloff. The Community Home Lenders of America has cited a 1,567% increase in FICO's mortgage-score costs since January 2024; FHFA Director Bill Pulte has cited an 1,800% increase for what appears to be the same underlying complaint. Neither figure has been reconciled, but both describe an industry that believes FICO's pricing power has run far ahead of its costs.
Equifax and TransUnion shares fell alongside FICO on Friday, an odd reaction given that all three bureaus jointly own VantageScore and should, in principle, benefit from its adoption. Pulte's broader rhetoric calling bureau pricing "cartel-like" may explain the spillover, though neither company has said so directly.
FICO traded at $935 in early pre-market activity Tuesday, essentially flat versus Friday's close, a thin reading well before the regular session. The real signal comes once today's full session is behind it: whether a stock that lost a sixth of its value in a day finds a floor now that the market has had a weekend to think it over, or whether Friday's move was only the opening step in a longer repricing of FICO's mortgage-scoring monopoly.