Why FICO stock is crashing

REDDIT.COMApr 10, 10:15 PM UTC

Key insights

  • FICO's stock declined following the FHFA's decision to allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to use VantageScore 4.0. Banks are incentivized to use the cheaper VantageScore, even if FICO's scoring is superior, as they sell the loans to GSEs. This shift could negatively impact FICO's revenue and market share, increasing risk in mortgage-backed securities.
Why FICO stock is crashing

From what i heard, the stock moved down today because in a podcast this morning, the CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) revealed that the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) is making the VantageScore 4.0 operational for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Now here is my take on the whole thing:

Before Fico was a monopoly. Now you have vantagescore. Fico claimed that while Vantagescore and Classic Fico scoring has similar performance, their new FICO 10T scoring is much better than vantagescore 4.0 at detecting default loans. Unfortunately, Fannie and Freddie (GSEs) have only approved lenders to use either Vantage4.0 or Classic FICO. Lender can choose.

Now something like 70 percents of loans that are given out by banks are in turn sold to GSEs by banks. GSEs then package these loans as mortgage backed securities and sell to investors and pension funds. As far as banks are concerned, the money they make is the origination fees and associated stuff. The loan itself doesn't stay on their books. Using vantagescore 4.0 to do credit scoring and underwriting is cheaper since recently they have lowered the prices of vantagescore4.0 to 99 cents or something.

So if you are a bank, GSEs have Now said you can use vantagescore4.0 or FICO to score and underwrite loans. For you, using Vantagescore4.0 is waay cheaper and will lower your costs and allow you to keep more of the loan origination fees. Why should you care even if FICO scoring might be better at detecting bad loans compared to vantagescore? You are anyway going to turn the loan over to GSEs right so the loans are going to be on their books not yours. If they go bad, that's Fannie and Freddie's problem not yours. And later problem of whomever buys MBS. Govt can't blame you because literally they have approved use of vantagescore .

TLDR:

So FICO's problem is even if FICO truly has the better scoring and safer loans, banks are not incentives to use it but to go for the cheapest scoring algorithm approved. Which means either FICO has to lower prices or be okay with sharing revenue. If they have better algo, they might still be used for the 30 percent of loans which banks keep on their books. Honestly maybe instead of spending money to make their scoring better etc FICO should have lobbied the govt and paid them all off to not allow Vantage4.0 or something. Because clearly the govt doesn't care enough to actually conduct some studies and make sure that vantage4.0 and fico 10 T are comparable and both safe so as not to repeat 2008.

For what it's worth, FICO has a really good management team and is a well run company. They do what they do really well. I myself am a shareholder. I don't know how low the shares will go. If the Fed is forced to cut when the economy crashes and 10 year yield goes down and mortgages come down, definitely lots of people will refinance and that should increase FICOS mortgage loans segment revenue.

what do you all think? I would love to hear thoughts and any points where I'm thinking wrong.

Continue reading on REDDIT.COM

Related Articles