In November 2025, Equifax published a statement making the case that FICO is the villain in the mortgage credit cost story. It was just one more shot across the bow from the 3Bs at FICO; a battle we’ve been watching play out in real time for years.
The numbers don’t lie: FICO’s per-score price has gone up 1,800% since 2020. It’s damning. It’s also a bureau pointing a finger at the single competitor to VantageScore, an entity Equifax co-owns with Experian and TransUnion.
FICO fires back just as hard. In their own published blogs, they document that the bureaus marked up the FICO score approximately 100% for decades, buying the score and doubling the price before it ever reached a lender. In a piece published in MBA Newslink just last month, they call the bureaus’ ownership of VantageScore an “inherent conflict of interest” and say the bureaus have “immense market power” to tilt competition in their own favor. They’re not wrong. Nobody in this fight is wrong about what the other guy is doing. That’s exactly the problem. Everyone’s shifting blame. Nobody’s fixing anything. Zero accountability. And the industry (and its consumers) keeps paying.
Here’s an opinion that’s sure to get some pushback from those of us immersed in the 100 year war over credit reporting and pricing: FICO and the bureaus are indeed villains. No question. They’ve abused the privileged positions they were handed, and they deserve every bit of the heat they’re taking. But those privileges came from somewhere. They’re all bad fruit from the same rotten tree. And that tree is the FHFA. The policy and regulatory framework that handed one company a de facto monopoly on credit scoring and handed three companies a government-mandated oligopoly on credit data, then left both structures untouched for decades while lenders and borrowers paid the bill.
FICO’s mortgage score price was locked in contracts with the three credit bureaus for nearly thirty years. From 1989 until 2018, the royalty barely moved. Not because FICO didn’t want to raise it. Surely they did. But because the contracts didn’t allow it. FICO has made this claim repeatedly in their own blog posts, articles, interviews, and white papers. The 2018 increase was the first meaningful pricing change in almost three decades. The industry (according to the FICO narrative) is experiencing thirty years of suppressed price increases hitting all at once, not five years of greed.
And when those contracts were renegotiated starting in 2012 FICO got the right to raise prices once a year with advance notice to the bureaus, who then issue their own rate sheets to resellers. FICO goes first. The bureaus follow. The CHLA (Community Home Lenders of America) put it plainly in their own report, issued recently: “If FICO did not raise prices each fall, neither would the others.” I’d push back on that conclusion. The bureaus are perfectly capable of finding their own excuse to raise prices, with or without FICO leading the way. But the contract structure makes it easy; every time FICO pulls the trigger, the bureaus collect more.
Meanwhile, the bureaus have been marking up the FICO score approximately 100%, though it’s admittedly very difficult to get an accurate breakdown of that figure. FICO has repeatedly published this claim. The 3Bs buy the score, double the price, and pass it to resellers. The resellers then tack on their own markup before the file reaches the lender. Three dominoes, each one taking a cut. Under the current rules, nobody’s required to break out who took what.
So the industry goes after FICO. Understandably. One company, one CEO, one face to fight. Will Lansing makes tens of millions a year and publicly talks about raising prices even further. The mortgage industry represents about 25% of FICO’s total business, and the profit margins are outlandish. Their score has no competition in conforming mortgage. Easy target. The bureaus get much less of the anger, even though they built the contracts, took the markup, and followed every increase with one of their own. There’s an advantage in an oligopoly: the illusion of competition and the ability to spread the incoming barrage across a wider plain.
Now VantageScore is being positioned as the solution. The FHFA’s interim policy opens the door to VantageScore 4.0. Equifax’s infographic projects $600 million in savings and north of 33 million additional new entrants to the housing market (but with an actual net of 2 million qualified buyers). Is it the competitive savior the mortgage industry is hoping for on the scoring model side?
It isn’t.
Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion own VantageScore. They also control the data, the pricing, and the distribution channels for both FICO and VantageScore. FICO in MBA Newslink: the bureaus have “immense market power and both the ability and incentive to manipulate different levers” in favor of the score they own. Under a tri-merge requirement, there is nothing to stop them from conditioning access to credit data on lenders using VantageScore, or pricing FICO out of reach. VantageScore at 99 cents is a loss leader. The question is what it costs in five years if they knock FICO off its perch and three companies own everything with no independent alternative in sight.
And then there’s the debate around tri-merge versus single-bureau pull that seems to have gone off a cliff. The argument for pulling from one bureau instead of three makes sense on costs. It makes little sense, at this point, on anything else. Servicers can’t price MSRs or portfolios without consistent tri-source data. Investors have priced risk against thirty years of tri-merge convention. A hard pivot to a single bureau is trading one problem for a worse one.
But the answer isn’t staying with what we have either. What we need is a unified vision and a coalition across the residential lending spectrum that encourages creative solutions.
We already solved a version of this problem. Less than 20 year ago, the appraisal industry was the wild west: lenders were pressuring appraisers to hit predetermined numbers, valuation fraud and price manipulation had become rampant, and independent judgment had collapsed. The AMC (appraisal management company) model was built to fix exactly that: a firewall between lenders and appraisers designed to curb the fraud and restore independence.
And critically, the fix wasn’t to pick one appraiser and mandate everyone use them (imagine what an appraisal would cost today if that were the solution). It was a panel model. Approved pools. Lender choice within a regulated framework. Competition on quality and price, not captivity to a single provider.
The CFPB recognizes dozens of consumer reporting agencies operating across auto, insurance, banking, and rental markets. Firms like Innovis, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Cotality, and others. They collect and report consumer credit data at scale. They’re FCRA-compliant. They already have the infrastructure.
Here’s what I’d like to see: FHFA opens a formal application process for credit reporting agencies to become GSE-approved data providers. You build toward a pool of at least ten. Lenders pick any three. You keep tri-merge. You keep the data quality. You introduce real pricing competition across bureaus, real competition on FICO markups, and a market where no three companies can hold the entire industry hostage because there is nowhere else to go.
When bureaus are actually competing against each other for lender business, the 100% markup on the FICO score (or whatever the real number is) becomes unsustainable on its own. You can’t double the price of a commodity when nine other vendors are selling the same thing without the surcharge. Competition at the bureau level fixes the markup problem without anyone having to legislate it away.
At the same time we work to get VantageScore actually implemented and see what that brings.
FICO’s price increases are real and they’ve been painful. I’m not walking that back. The bureaus’ conflicts of interest are real. Both grievances are legitimate. But every ounce of energy the industry spends attacking each other and trying to win the tri-merge vs. single-pull or “is it FICO or is it the 3Bs?” debates is energy not spent pushing FHFA to fix the structure that made all of it possible.
The $540 blended cost per closed loan isn’t the ceiling. Without structural reform, it’s the floor. Let’s take the fight to the people who set the rules.
Coby Hakalir is a mortgage industry consultant, podcaster, writer, and content creator.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners. To contact the editor responsible for this piece: zeb@hwmedia.com.
