Fiserv is now competing with Fair Isaac, source of the ubiquitous Fico credit scores.
Fair Isaac weighs up to 20 variables when modeling a small fry's risk profile.
Meanwhile, Fair Isaac remains skeptical about the value of social networks in assessing risk.
They all use different proprietary scoring models to assess creditworthiness, as does Fair Isaac Corp.
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Now they're talking about selling their own score, which they wouldn't have to license from Fair Isaac.
Surprisingly, real estate--including landlords, agents and developers--has a relatively low risk profile, according to Fair Isaac's data.
Two more big guru buys were in shares of specialized software companies: Avid Technology and Fair Isaac.
Mr. HENDRICKS: Fair Isaac is the first creator of the widely used credit score, which is known as the FICO score.
Fair Isaac Corp. evaluates a different kind of risk: the risk that a credit card or mortgage borrower will stiff the lender.
Fair Isaac estimates that 500 million such notices will go out to consumers this year, says Careen Foster, FICO's director of scores product management.
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Best known for its credit-score calculation services, Minneapolis-based Fair Isaac also sells software to government and industry for making business decisions and reviewing medical bills.
Fair Isaac, a large fraud-detection firm based in Minneapolis, operates a system so fast that it can block dialled calls before they are even connected.
Another study, released Tuesday by credit-score provider Fair Isaac Corp.
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Although there are different varieties of credit scores, the most widely used one is called FICO, named for its inventor, Fair Isaac Corp (NYSE: FICO).
The borrowers had average Fair Isaac Corp. credit scores of 685, a tad above the 660 that conventionally divides the world of prime mortgages from subprime.
Even when Fair Isaac in 1999 rolled out its new and improved model, most lenders just stayed with the old one because apparently they thought it was good enough.
"The weird thing about industry classification is that, depending on the sources we look at, there are varying rates of risk, " says Cordell Wise, a Fair Isaac product manager.
But a closer look by the folks at Fair Isaac, a business research firm and father of the FICO credit score, suggests that some industries are indeed riskier than others.
But right now, some of this looks like a move to possibly cut out Fair Isaac, and so that they can just sell their own score without having to pay that license fee.
The other two are still talking about using a numerical score, which will be a new scale from 500 to 900 where the scale we know with Fair Isaac is 350 to 850.
And when you open an account, your credit score can take a hit because research has shown that people who open new accounts tend to be riskier, said Barry Paperno, consumer-affairs manager at Fair Isaac Corp.
Two more big guru buys were in shares of specialized software companies: Avid Technology (nasdaq: AVID - news - people ) and Fair Isaac (nyse: FIC - news - people ).
Mr. HENDRICKS: If it ain't broke why fix it, and also, like, if you're handicapping this, and you're sort of betting on whose going to end up the winner, I mean my money's still on Fair Isaac right now.
But a closer look by the folks at Fair Isaac (nyse: FIC - news - people ), a business research firm and father of the FICO credit score, suggests that some industries are indeed riskier than others.
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