American Express has launched a new feature called ‘Score Goals‘ as part of their MyCredit Guide suite of credit scoring products. This product is available to both American Express cardholders and those without an American Express card. Score goals lets you do three main things:
- Receive personalized recommendations
- Set your credit score goals
- Track your credit score
Unfortunately as this is part of MyCredit Guide it uses VantageScore as the credit scoring model, whereas for actual lending decisions (e.g whether to approve or deny you for a new card) American Express generally uses a variation of the FICO score. Because of that there is very little value here for consumers.
Standing by for Amex’s “Anti-Gaming Goals” feature.
Given that VantageScore was created by the 3 lenders themselves and not by FICO, it’s reasonable to think the banks and credit agencies are working together to manipulate people’s actual risk (calculated by FICO scores) to engage in targeted marketing. For example, VantageScore can show “at-risk” consumers a lower score to either discourage them or encourage them to pay off their debt, and people that are more reliable to pay off debt a higher score to get them to apply for unncessary credit.
I am one of those people who has a Vantage score that is way lower than my FICO score. At first I was shocked, until i googled it and found lots of people who had Vantage scores as much as 100 points lower than their FICO scores.
Sorry amex. Vantage scores are worthless.
This is interesting. I haven’t heard of this happening, but my Vantage score is always within 5-10 points of my FICO score, so I just assumed it was fine
VantageScore is good proxy. This has a lot of value for people that know nothing about scores. Probably none of your readers.
Huh
How about Pop Up goals
Lmao
too soon lmao