Citibank To Start Offering Cardholders Free FICO Scores

Citibank has announced that starting in January, 2015 they will provide their cardholders with access to their FICO score for free. Unfortunately this won’t be able to all Citibank cardholders, it will only be available to those who hold a Citibank branded card. Those with a co-branded card (e.g Expedia & American Airlines) will not have access to this score.

Here is some more key information about this offering:

• Scores will be updated monthly
• The score used is the same score used by Citibank for their credit card lending decisions. Presumably an industry specific bank card enhanced score. I believe Citibank is currently using the 2008 model.
• This will be based on the cardholders Equifax credit report. The majority of other card issuers provide consumers with their TransUnion credit score/FICO score.

This was announced as part of President Obama’s executive order “BuySecure”. We’ll have more on what’s included as part of this executive ordering in the near future. Chase & Bank of America are also considering offering consumers with free access to their FICO score and I’m lead to believe that Capital One will also be changing their credit tracker offering in the near future.

Anything that helps to better educate consumers about how credit scoring works can only be seen as a good thing. Hopefully this leads consumers to review their credit report as well to check it for inaccuracies and errors which could be leading them to be denied loans or to pay higher than necessary interest rates on their existing loans.

There are currently a few other credit card issuers offering free FICO scores, for example: Barclaycard, Discover, Walmart, FNBO, PenFed. All of which are offering these scores under the FICO Open Access initiative. In addition to this there are a number of financial institutions that offer these scores freely with other products (e.g checking accounts). For a full and up to date list of ways to get your FICO score for free I’d recommend reading this page.

It’ll be interesting to see how the free credit monitoring sites respond to more and more card issuers giving consumers access to their FICO scores for free (these sites only provide consumers with FAKO scores). Companies like Credit Karma have tried to differentiate themselves by offering credit card reviews, whilst Credit Sesame offers free identity theft insurance.