‘We have a winner-takes-all system’: VantageScore CEO Tavares

Abstract

As VantageScore's relatively new CEO, he is evolving the company's eponymous score, an alternative to the FICO credit score, to include more data gleaned from outside the credit bureaus and to try to more accurately predict the creditworthiness of lower-income and underrepresented populations. Tavares, who formerly headed analytics groups at Visa and First Data and was chairman and CEO of the Digital Commerce Alliance, an association of large banks, tech companies and retailers, says he was drawn to VantageScore's stated mission of using data and analytics to include more people into the credit system. We spend a lot of time looking at data analytics and figuring out how we can use that data to be more predictive and include more creditworthy borrowers so that they, like my family, can also realize their American dream. We look at some of the same data, but we treat that data in different ways. So we look at the data in fundamentally different ways and include new data in our models. So for the specific example that you talked about, which is rental payment data, what we've found is that when you include rental payment data, on the whole, it actually benefits many more people than it hurts. So are you taking the rental payment data from the bank account data?There are lots of mom and pop landlords who don't have the wherewithal to report data into a credit reporting agency.