{"id":20449,"date":"2026-03-23T19:16:56","date_gmt":"2026-03-23T19:16:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/hawley-investigates-fico-for-mortgage-credit-scoring\/"},"modified":"2026-03-23T19:16:56","modified_gmt":"2026-03-23T19:16:56","slug":"hawley-investigates-fico-for-mortgage-credit-scoring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/hawley-investigates-fico-for-mortgage-credit-scoring\/","title":{"rendered":"Hawley investigates FICO for mortgage credit scoring"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sen. Josh Hawley<\/a> is launching an investigation into how the dominant player in credit scoring prices its services for the mortgage market.<\/p>\n

The Missouri Republican sent a letter Monday to Fair Isaac Corp.<\/u><\/a>, known more widely by its acronym FICO, announcing his intention to investigate the company\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese price increases are most damaging to the Americans who can least afford them. First-time homebuyers bear a disproportionate burden of the cost,\u201d Hawley wrote in the letter to FICO, which was obtained exclusively by Blue Light News.<\/p>\n

Hawley, who chairs a Judiciary Committee subpanel, added in his letter to the FTC<\/u><\/a> that he wants the agency to \u201cinvestigate unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices\u201d and that he believes it\u2019s well-positioned \u201cto investigate anticompetitive behavior at FICO\u201d separate from his own probe.<\/p>\n

FICO did not immediately return a request for comment.<\/p>\n

Hawley has weighed in on the issue of rising credit score pricing before, but Monday\u2019s letters draw one of the GOP\u2019s key populist messengers further into a battle between FICO\u2019s near-monopoly power and what some call an oligopoly of the three major credit bureaus, TransUnion, Equifax and Experian.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cpotentially anticompetitive practices in the credit scoring market.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019 eligibility for a loan and charge those homebuyers for the cost of purchasing that information.<\/p>\n

The credit bureaus raised alarm last year over significant increases in FICO\u2019s prices \u2014 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\u2019s mortgage.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s price increases for credit scores. The lawmaker also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20449\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}