VantageScore And The Public Record

VantageScore-public-record-white-paper

The three credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian and Equifax), under a program called the National Consumer Assistance Plan (NCAP) are looking for ways to improve their methods of collecting, reporting and updating data related to public records. Though the rulemaking is not final, the conventional wisdom is that there will be a decrease in the number of tax liens and public record judgements that will be included on individual consumers’ credit profiles. The impact could be substantial, as more than half of such data could be left off public records.

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    As many as 7 percent of consumers in the United States have civil judgements on their credit profiles, with 3 percent subject to tax liens; less than 1 percent of U.S. consumers have both on their record.

    That begs the question: How to measure credit risk when the available and included data is limited? Tax-lien and civil-judgement data are highly predictive of default risk, and traditional models lose their predictive power, said VantageScore. One advantage accrues to the consumer, with a credit profile likely to improve with the absence of such judgements thrown into the risk scoring mix.

    VantageScore said it gauged the impact of a maximum-impact scenario, in which all tax liens and civil judgements were removed from credit files. The analysis looked at a random sampling of 4 million consumers, culled from the Experian database. Under the extreme scenario in which all liens and judgements were removed, VantageScore found that credit files for 11 percent of the sample population were affected, and 8 percent of the population saw changes in their credit scores, with the average change being an increase of 11 points. And for the VantageScore 3.0 model, predictive accuracy dropped “only minimally,” the company said, and rank-ordering, the listing of consumers sequentially, according to relative default risk, remained in “highly effective.”

    The overall result, using the VantageScore model, is one where 8 percent of the population saw a boost in the wake of removing all liens and judgements. The majority of changes, said the firm, took place among consumers with scores in the lower reaches of VantageScore 3.0’s score range of 300-850, particularly 350 to 600; in this subset of the test sample, the impact of boosting credit scores absent the liens/judgements becomes palpable, with a 10-percent improvement in scores.

    To Download: Impact To VantageScore 3.0, click here.


    ACH Same-Day Q2 Volume Increases 15% to Nearly $1T

    The ACH Network says it has seen “significant” gains in same-day payments since last year.

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      Those transactions were up 15% during the second quarter compared to last year, helping drive overall growth of 5%, the payments network that underpins most U.S. payroll, bill pay and B2B invoices said Monday (July 21).

      “The continued robust growth of Same Day ACH shows how it is serving payments use cases for consumers, businesses, government agencies and other organizations,” Jane Larimer, president and CEO of Nacha, which operates the ACH network, said in a news release provided to PYMNTS. “As we enter the second half of the year, we expect to see this trend continue.”

      In all, ACH Network growth continued during the quarter, with 8.7 billion payments valued at $23.3 trillion, respective increases of 5% and 7.9% year over year. The network saw 336.4 million same-day payments, moving $980.3 billion in value, up 15% and 22% respectively. During the first half of this year, Same Day ACH handled 662.4 million payments valued at almost $1.9 trillion.

      “Business-to-business ACH volume grew apace, with more than 2 billion payments, up 10.6% from the same period in 2024,” the release added. “Claim payments to healthcare providers grew by 9.9% to 138.2 million payments.”

      The report follows a quarter in which the volume of Same Day ACH payments climbed 19.1% year over year to reach 326 million, with the value of those payments increasing 24.8%.

      In related news, PYMNTS explored the “speed-and-security paradox” surrounding faster payments in a recent conversation with Bill Wardwell, senior vice president of payments, treasury and supplier services at spend management platform Coupa, and Katie Elliott, senior risk and fraud officer at B2B payments network Bottomline.

      “I know it seems counterintuitive, but I’m going to say it: Slowing down is the best practice for faster payments,” Elliott said.

      She said her remedy is to introduce friction into high-risk moments like vendor onboarding or a change to routing instructions, while allowing an already vetted payment to proceed across real-time payment or same-day ACH rails. When urgency is not part of the equation, business email compromise schemes that rely on fear and deadlines lose their potency.

      The hidden enemy is fragmentation, Wardwell added. Pointing to a soon-to-be-published Coupa survey, he said that nearly 80% of the companies that suffered payment fraud were using multiple payment workflow systems.