I thought 'credit score' was meaningless

Yorkshire_Pud

It’s taken me a few months to get my head around this idea that credit scores are meaningless but now I can see that they are. It’s clear now that a high score doesn’t make you any more likely to get a product than a low score.
My Experian score has been in free fall for months and They kept trying to sell me their brokered credit card deals of 38% apr and also stated I had 0% chance of getting any other deal.
Independently of them I went direct to tsb and opened a 0% purchases credit card albeit with only a 12m 0% period and a higher than usual apr of 28%. So I am not getting the best deals these days but it’s nothing to do with my credit score. More likely it’s do with a credit use total that is close to my annual income.

However Experian didn’t offer the tsb card and were wrong that I had 0% chance of opening a comparable card.

Emotionally I don’t like to see the low score but I suppose that’s how Experian get mugs jumping through hoops and paying to see their credit scores in real time so manipulation is the name of game. Maybe even take one of their brokered very high interest Capital One, Aqua et al 0% credit cards! No doubt the commission is higher for these cards. Although they do call me by my Christian name so they must have my best interests at heart (not).

They could just as well say if you pay £20 a month for our Gold subscription we will give you a score of 999 and if you pay us £10 a month for our silver subscription you can have a score of 600 and for just £5 our bronze sub for a score of 200 with options to upgrade to the next level for a higher score.

[Deleted User]

whitesmith said:

it seems to me that there is a lot of conflating the idea that credit scores are 'meaningless' with the use of that score in processing credit applications by lenders.

Credit scores are rarely used by lenders in making their decisions but that does not mean they are meaningless

Credit scores are NEVER, not rarely, used by lenders. Lenders DO NOT SEE the public score you get, they get the data only.

sourcrates

Yorkshire_Pud said:

They could just as well say if you pay £20 a month for our Gold subscription we will give you a score of 999 and if you pay us £10 a month for our silver subscription you can have a score of 600 and for just £5 our bronze sub for a score of 200 with options to upgrade to the next level for a higher score.

What you have written above is the most simplistic reason why credit scoring exists in the UK, it is purely and simply, a marketing tool.

Ultimately, it’s up to lenders to decide who they are comfortable to lend to and, for the most part, this process is shrouded in mystery. There’s no universal credit score, each lender has its own system in place to decide whether or not to accept you, meaning you could be turned down by one, but successful with another.

But it’s this complex modelling that means credit scoring can feel like a dark art and leave many feeling powerless or unwilling to engage with their credit reports.

Each credit reference agency and each lender will have its own criteria for how to calculate a credit score, but until, or if, the FICO system is introduced over here, we will still be non the wiser trying to fathem out such a complex system.