Hawley investigates FICO for mortgage credit scoring

Sen. Josh Hawley is launching an investigation into how the dominant player in credit scoring prices its services for the mortgage market.

The Missouri Republican sent a letter Monday to Fair Isaac Corp., known more widely by its acronym FICO, announcing his intention to investigate the company’s price increases for credit scores. The lawmaker also sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission urging the agency to do the same. Hawley argues that the increasing cost of credit scores is straining homebuyers in an already unaffordable market.

“These price increases are most damaging to the Americans who can least afford them. First-time homebuyers bear a disproportionate burden of the cost,” Hawley wrote in the letter to FICO, which was obtained exclusively by POLITICO.

Hawley, who chairs a Judiciary Committee subpanel, added in his letter to the FTC that he wants the agency to “investigate unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices” and that he believes it’s well-positioned “to investigate anticompetitive behavior at FICO” separate from his own probe.

FICO did not immediately return a request for comment.

Hawley has weighed in on the issue of rising credit score pricing before, but Monday’s letters draw one of the GOP’s key populist messengers further into a battle between FICO’s near-monopoly power and what some call an oligopoly of the three major credit bureaus, TransUnion, Equifax and Experian.

He is requesting FICO hand over a slew of documents and records as part of the investigation, which he said could meld into a separate, larger Judiciary Committee investigation into “potentially anticompetitive practices in the credit scoring market.”

FICO sells its algorithm for determining credit scores to the three bureaus, which collect consumer data to produce a larger credit report. (The bureaus are rolling out a competitor model, VantageScore.) Lenders use credit reports to determine potential homebuyers’ eligibility for a loan and charge those homebuyers for the cost of purchasing that information.

The credit bureaus raised alarm last year over significant increases in FICO’s prices — from 60 cents to $10 over the last five years. Lenders say that those costs can inflate to hundreds of dollars added to a homebuyer’s mortgage.