FICO Score 10T has taken another step toward potential adoption by government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, with the credit scoring company reaching an agreement with the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) for the release of historical data associated with single-family loan-level datasets.
That’s according to a Monday blog post penned by Julie May, vice president and general manager of business-to-business scores at FICO. She noted the release is designed to make FICO 10T datasets “broadly accessible to market participants.”
“In the coming weeks, the three credit bureaus will deliver FICO Score 10T data to the GSEs,” May wrote. “We expect that the GSEs will conduct their own validation of the data and make FICO Score 10T historical datasets, which will be updated to also include more recent data through 2025, accessible to market participants.”
May elaborated that lenders, investors, third-party risk modelers and other market participants will be able to access and retrieve those historical datasets through Fannie’s and Freddie’s websites.
The announcement follows a Nov. 10 social media post by FHFA Director Bill Pulte, in which he indicated his agency is in talks to add FICO 10T to the approved credit scoring models for loans delivered to Fannie and Freddie.
“This would be great for consumers and the safety of the mortgage market, to have both FICO 10T Score and VantageScore 4.0,” Pulte wrote. “Stay tuned! Very close to a deal.”
Previously, only the flagship Classic FICO model was approved for Fannie and Freddie loans. That shifted in July when Pulte announced that lenders would also be allowed to use VantageScore 4.0, a tri-bureau credit scoring model from VantageScore Solutions, a company jointly owned by the major credit bureaus Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.
Notably absent from Pulte’s July announcement was mention of FICO 10T, a newer model launched in 2020 that uses trended credit bureau data to assess how a borrower’s creditworthiness has evolved.
FICO 10T was validated and approved for use by Fannie and Freddie in 2022, but it was never officially implemented by the government-sponsored mortgage investors.
The competition between FICO and VantageScore heated up over the summer, with the companies releasing competing analyses touting the superiority of their respective credit scoring models in predicting mortgage defaults.
While the FICO white paper compared FICO 10T to VantageScore 4.0, the VantageScore analysis compared its latest model to the older Classic FICO model, which it said was due to insufficient data released publicly by FICO.
Based on the latest announcement by FICO, that data may soon be available for side-by-side comparisons.
