FICO Falls 15% as FHFA Opens Mortgage Scoring to All Lenders
U.S. markets are closed for the weekend, and the next session is Tuesday. Exchanges are shut Monday for Labor Day, so trading resumes at 9:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday, September 8 (4:30 p.m. in Istanbul). Two regulatory decisions from Friday are not fully priced yet.
The FHFA ended FICO's monopoly on mortgage credit scoring. Director Bill Pulte on Friday instructed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to accept VantageScore 4.0 from all originators, effective immediately. The move ends a four-month pilot that had been limited to 50 lenders since May 1. Pulte said FICO has raised the price of a single consumer credit score by 1,800% since 2020. Even under the pilot, VantageScore 4.0 had reached more than 9% of GSE-securitized mortgages as of August 31; an independent study estimates a full rollout saves more than $930M market-wide in the first year.
FICO closed down 15.2%. The loss ran as deep as 20% premarket. The mechanism is direct: mortgage scoring was the part of the Scores segment where pricing power held, and competition pulls down both the per-score price and the volume share.
Memory moved the other way: Micron closed above $1,000. OpenAI's release of its GPT-6 Astra model re-accelerated the AI-infrastructure trade; rose 6.1% to $1,016.59, its first close above $1,000 since August 17. gained 11.9% to $1,740 in a third straight advance, pricing in its addition to the S&P 100 later this month.
