Auto Enhanced Fico Score
Auto Enhanced Fico Score was developed by Fair Isaac especially for the auto industry, to help it better predict the risks involved in lending money for car loans. Other names are ‘FICO Auto Industry Option Score’, ‘Beacon 09’ and ‘FICO Auto-Enhanced Score’.When you apply for a car loan, MOST CJANCES are that the POTENTIAL lender will pull your Auto Enhanced Fico, which is usually 50 points or so lower than your classic FICO.
Why a different score?
It is a well-known fact that consumers often pay loan obligations differently. For this reason, the car industry uses a score that emphasize car-loan information, particularly late car loan payments, settled car loans, auto repossessions, car loan charge offs and car loans that went to collections.
This kind of negative information hurts your Auto Enhanced Fico score more than it would your classic FICO score. Similarly, non car loan related negative information (e.g. late credit card payments, liens, collections etc.) will have lesser negative effect on your Auto Enhanced Fico.
Basically, if you handled prior car loans good – you will most likely have a good Auto Enhance Fico, and vice versa.
There are two problems associated with auto Enhanced Fico:
- You as a consumer cannot get your auto enhanced score. No one will give or sell it to you. Only to car dealers. So you have no way to know what your score is.
- Not all car dealers use it. Some use classic Fico, others use both (what’s better for them/what’s worse for you!).
So how do you beat car dealers at their own game?
For more information please see this post.