Mortgage Connects an MGIC Podcast

Credit clarity and updates for loan originators

• MGIC MI

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For mortgage professionals, staying informed about current developments in credit reporting is crucial for providing excellent service. In this episode of Mortgage Connects, Mike Olden from American Reporting Company shares expert insights on trigger leads, credit score modernization, medical debt, and student loan forgiveness - plus strategies to help borrowers optimize their credit profiles.

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Alexis Panaro:

Welcome to Mortgage Connects by MGIC, bringing you the latest insights from top mortgage professionals around the industry. I'm your host, Alexis Panaro, and today I'm happy to bring you a very special guest, a longtime partner of MGIC, Mr. Mike Olden. Mike is VP of Sales and Education at American Reporting Company, otherwise known as ARC, and we frequently had him on some of our webinars, but today, Mike and I wanted to sit down and discuss some of the hot topics that we're hearing about in the credit world. So, Mike, how are you doing today? Welcome.

Mike Olden:

I'm doing well. Thank you so much, Alexis. It's always a pleasure and we have had a long partnership with MGIC, going back to about 2007. And my good colleague and your co-worker, Dean Dardzinski, and I started this partnership back at that time and I think it's developed really well. We share a lot of clients and I was just with one of your account managers, Steve Beagles, earlier this week. Today is February 28th that I'm speaking to you and we have an early spring day in Seattle. It's sunny and about 60 degrees, so I'm delighted for that.

Alexis Panaro:

About the same weather here in Milwaukee. So it is nice because we've had some cold weather, so it's nice to have a little warmer weather than we've been having. And I can always count on you, Mike, to give me the year that our partnership started. I could never remember so 2007.

Mike Olden:

Right, it's a long time, yeah, long time, but really one of our favorite and best industry partnerships here at ARC.

Alexis Panaro:

Yes, we appreciate it and thank you, yeah, for setting some time aside today. As Mike mentioned. I do want to note the date it is February 28th 2025, the day that we're recording this, just in case some things may change after that, but we want to make sure we're giving you that date and I know here at MGIC, we hear a lot from LOs about credit confusion. So you know what are trigger leads, how can we prevent trigger leads? What's going on with medical debt? What's to come with credit score modernization and so on, and we are not the experts. So, Mike, I'm happy you can join us today to kind of go over some of these frequently asked questions that we've been getting.

Mike Olden:

Well, thank you, and I am delighted and we receive the same questions. We answer these almost on a daily basis and I'm happy to share it because this is our field of expertise. This is our profession within the mortgage, banking and real estate finance industry, but some of the information we're going to share with the listeners today transcends any industry, because we're all consumers and I know you and I have talked about our own personal experiences and journeys in regards to credit and credit scores, so we're always really happy to share our knowledge with our colleagues and peers in the industry.

Alexis Panaro:

Great, great. Well, let's get into it here. I have a list of questions, so I'll just kind of shoot them over at you and we'll go through everything here. So one thing I know we get asked about is how you know how, as a lender, can we best prepare our borrowers before we pull their credit report.

Mike Olden:

Exactly, and we get that question a lot here at ARC as well, and I think there's a few items that we as professionals can inform, educate and encourage borrowers to do before they even sit down with the lender and especially before the lender pulls the credit report. So when and I talk to borrowers about all of these items, especially when I do home buyer classes number one review your personal credit report, and it's really easy today because annualcreditreportcom, which is the official free site for consumers to view their personal credit report, in spite of the name annual, we can view our personal credit report once per week for free, and it changed from annually to weekly right after the pandemic, so it's very easy for consumers to do that. I recommend that you pull your personal credit report. Annualcreditreportcom is the official site. You could also go directly to the three major credit bureaus FICO, credit, karma. Those are all soft hit inquiries, so no impact on our scores. But what's most important is to look at that report and then determine are there any credit reporting errors that we need to address, and a great site to help with going through that process is the Federal Trade Commission, ftcgov, and we're going to provide a resource guide with a lot of the items that Alexis and I are talking about today, but there's even a template letter there. They've done all the work on how to you know, when you want to dispute something with the bureaus or a creditor, I think determine do you have any high credit card balances? If you do, do you have the ability to pay those down before your lender pulls the credit report? That will help you optimize your credit score.

Mike Olden:

Also, opting out Alexis, you mentioned trigger leads and we'll talk more in detail about that. But if we opt out, we are protecting ourselves. When our lender pulls the credit report, we're not going to get inundated with dozens, with dozens, sometimes scores, of inquiry calls or text messages or items coming through the mail and then, just before the lender pulls the credit report, if a borrower has a credit freeze or a credit lock on their file, they want to temporarily remove those. If they don't and our lender audience today pulls the credit report, they're not going to see all of the borrower's information and that's going to slow down the process. So I think those items for a borrower review your personal credit report, determine if there's any credit reporting errors. Do you have a plan for high credit card balances and to lower those. Make sure you opt out and then lift any freeze or lock just before your lender pulls credit, and that's going to make things far more efficient, not slow down the process.

Alexis Panaro:

Right, you mentioned paying down balances. Is that something that you would recommend borrowers do to possibly increase their scores, or any tips to kind of increase their scores before that report is officially pulled by a lender?

Mike Olden:

I do and determining if there's any credit reporting errors, especially items that are negative that may be impacting the score. Since they're on the credit report, the score is being calculated. But if they're reported an error, we want to help borrowers get those taken off through the proper channels and then, if a borrower does have high credit card balances, work to pay those down as much as possible. But when we've spoken with FICO they have stated a good rule of thumb is below 20 to 25 percent of the credit limit, doesn't necessarily have to be zero balance and certainly don't pay that off and close the account. That's not a good short term strategy closing accounts but work to do your best to get those below 20 to 25% of the credit limit and I feel that borrowers should start focusing on these items 30 to 90 days before they're ready to talk to a lender. Sometimes it's not possible to do that, but as best we can encourage borrowers start this process 30 to 90 days before the lender's going to pull credit.

Alexis Panaro:

Great, and we do have. Mgic has a infographic about how a credit score is made up. So we have X amount of that score kind of comes from credit utilization, x amount comes from the history of accounts and so forth. So all of these resources that Mike mentions or that I mentioned, we will put on the podcast episode page. So just keep an eye out for that Trigger leads.

Alexis Panaro:

Let's go back to that a little bit, can you talk about what a trigger lead is, and you know we're hearing about opting out and how can we do that and any updates on trigger leads.

Mike Olden:

Sure, and there's a couple different types of triggers. There are acquisition triggers, which that's typically when we're receiving those credit card solicitations in the mail. Those creditors are purchasing aspects of our credit file. They can't see the credit report because we haven't given them permission, but they do know that we're in a certain geographic area, typically a zip code. They know that our scores fall between this range and that range. We don't have any late payments or bankruptcies in the past 12 months, Whatever the attributes they're looking for for that target audience, and they send out those solicitations.

Mike Olden:

The trigger leads that are really a flashpoint in our industry for the past year or so is when a borrower applies for a mortgage loan and that triggers a notification to other lenders that Mike or Alexis or Dean are looking for a mortgage and then, if we have not opted out, we're going to get solicited, oftentimes heavily, by multiple lenders, and the best way to avoid that is encouraging borrowers to opt out. Opt out pre-screen is for mail, do not. Callgov is for phone, and those can go into place very quickly. There are some exemptions certain nonprofits who are trying to raise money, that type of thing, companies that you already have a relationship with but for the most part. That will eliminate probably 90% of those inquiries from other lenders.

Mike Olden:

So for our lender partners that are listening today, I encourage you send out that reminder, often to your database, to your realtor colleagues so they can share it. Then when that borrower comes to see you, hopefully they've already opted out and you can pull that credit report with confidence, knowing that your competitors are not going to inundate your borrower with a whole lot of activity. We're also going to share a template communication that you could send out to your database reminding them, encouraging them to opt out here. And you know, last year, in 2024, there were multiple pieces of legislation proposed at the federal level to control, restrict the use of trigger leads. Unfortunately, all of those failed to go through. I'm going to be those restrictions on trigger leads. So I think we'll have more information to share with our audience toward the middle or end of April on those efforts.

Alexis Panaro:

Great, and Mike and I were just discussing beforehand that we'd like to host a live webinar around that time. So keep an eye out for that. It'll be posted at mgiccom slash training where you can find either the live session or the recording of that session. So hopefully again end of April, maybe early May.

Mike Olden:

I'd like to point out too, that I'll sound the ARC trumpet here. We don't sell trigger leads and we never have. We feel it would be a detriment to our partnership with our lending partners. But I encourage the listeners talk to your credit reporting providers. Ask them that question directly, if they sell those or not. It is a source of revenue. It's legal for the bureaus or other third parties to sell them, but we don't. We would rather take the approach of helping our clients educate their borrowers on how to avoid them.

Alexis Panaro:

We appreciate that. I don't think I've heard anyone say that they are in favor of trigger leads.

Mike Olden:

Exactly.

Alexis Panaro:

You mentioned that pulling your own credit report from annualcreditreportcom creates a soft hit. So can you just kind of go over what a soft hit inquiry is versus a hard hit? And then I know some other questions that come into the hard hit inquiry is you know how many times can my borrower shop around for a rate, let's say within a certain time period, without that affecting their credit score?

Mike Olden:

There are two primary types of inquiries. There's soft inquiries and hard inquiries. A soft inquiry is when we look at our own credit report. Maybe it's directly through the bureaus or annualcreditreportcom, credit Karma etc. No impact on our credit score. Other uses of soft inquiries are when we are applying for rental. Maybe we're going to rent an apartment. That's typically a soft hit. Insurance, employment those are typically soft hit reports. If we have an existing account with a credit grantor, they may periodically pull a soft hit credit report for the purpose of account review and it's important to remember when we're opening new accounts. Somewhere in the disclosure or maybe you get an annual privacy notice from your credit grantors. Somewhere in there it says we reserve the right to periodically review your credit and that is going to be a soft hit credit report. So all of those categories no impact. We've also seen in the past year in our industry lenders beginning to use soft hit credit reports on the front end, especially with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to get a pre-approval for their borrower. It's a soft hit. The primary goal there is to eliminate the trigger lead action and protect that relationship. However, both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, prior to closing, do still require a hard-hit tri-merge credit report. Fha and VA on their streamlined refinances will close that refinance on just a soft-hit credit report. So those are certainly some benefits.

Mike Olden:

In our industry A hard hit inquiry is typically when we as consumers apply for the extension of credit. We're applying for a mortgage, an auto loan, a credit card, even a student loan. Those are typically hard hits. Even a student loan. Those are typically hard hits. They may impact our credit scores. How much depends on the overall file. But in our conversations with FICO and we're going to share a great piece on inquiries from them on average less than five points, so not as significant as some consumers feel on there.

Mike Olden:

The other part of your question, alexis, was in the mortgage industry, can we have multiple inquiries for the purpose of that action? And we can. Several years ago the bureaus and FICO put their heads together and said let's not penalize consumers for interest rate shopping. As consumers we want to find the lowest interest rate possible. One of my former colleagues gave me a great definition of credit. Credit is the cost of money, which is the interest rate, and the higher our scores, typically the lower the interest rate, the more we can borrow, many more opportunities etc. So in the mortgage industry you can have multiple inquiries within a 14 to 45 day period. They're all grouped together and scored just once. That's the same formula in the automobile industry and also in the student loan industry.

Mike Olden:

Now we can't co-mingle those inquiries. Each one is a different bucket, different bucket. And why is it 14 to 45 days? That's because Experian is still using the oldest version of FICO scores, fico V2. That's a 14-day deduplication window on mortgage inquiries window on mortgage inquiries. Transunion and Equifax are using versions four and five respectively. That's a 45-day period. When we get into FICO 10T their most recent version, it will always be a 45-day deduplication window.

Alexis Panaro:

I was going to say 14 to 45 days. That's quite a large range, but, as you mentioned, it sounds like if let's say there is a double hit on there, it shouldn't affect a credit score too dramatically maybe five points or so.

Mike Olden:

Right or so Right, and so if you have a borrower come in to your office today and they're concerned because last week they went to two other lenders you're certainly within that 14-day window and much more into that 45-day window you can speak confidently to them and state well, we're in this 14-day window, so a third inquiry isn't going to impact your score any further, because in the mortgage industry we can group those together. They're deduplicated. But the piece we're going to share from FICO goes into much greater detail and it's really an excellent piece. I would encourage our lender listeners today share that with your borrowers, because borrowers that is a major concern of theirs today are inquiries and how they impact their scores.

Alexis Panaro:

Yep, I know I'm always nervous to put my social security number in to pull because I'm like is this going to pull a? Is this a hard hit or a soft hit, or what's going to happen here? So again, that resource material that Mike is mentioning will be in the podcast episode page in the notes there for you All. Right, switching gears a little bit. Credit reports are getting a little costly.

Mike Olden:

So are there any strategies for lenders to reduce their costs on credit reports? In FICO scores to trended data which shows the past 24 months trends in consumer payment, are they carrying high credit card balances throughout that time and only making the minimum payment, for example, to just general increases from the credit bureaus? So right now we're seeing credit reports easily in the $80 to $100 range. What can lenders do to help reduce that? I feel one of the best tools available to lenders in the mortgage industry is to use a credit cascade. So the concept there is the lender will identify some parameters or attributes that they want met minimum standards. So, for example, no scores under 600, no bankruptcies in the past 24 months, no mortgage late payments in the past 12 months and so forth. There's many attributes that can be chosen. Then when that credit report is pulled, the first bureau if it doesn't meet those minimum standards, the process stops. So you're only paying for a single bureau rather than all three. That's one strategy in that credit cascade. We have some clients at ARC that pull two bureaus, because if you pull two bureaus, you know that one of those scores is going to be your mid score and that's what's most important in our industry. What's the mid score out of the three? So you could, in those two scenarios you could be saving 66% or at least 33% of your initial investment on a credit report. So I think that's an excellent strategy there.

Mike Olden:

We have some clients that are pulling a single bureau soft hit credit report that has no requirement of a firm offer of credit. You're really just taking a snapshot of that borrower so from a compliance standpoint you may not have to issue an adverse action letter or make a firm offer of credit there. It really is just kind of lifting up the sheet of paper and looking underneath. How does this look? Some clients ask us well, can we really get a good picture from a single bureau? And I believe you can.

Mike Olden:

In my experience in this industry, probably 85 to 90% of the time what shows up on one bureau shows up on all three. There's always going to be the outlier, the collection agency, that only reports to one bureau, or even a creditor that only reports to one bureau. But for the most part you're going to get a really good indication. Those reports are typically that single bureau soft hit, typically under $20. So it can be a very economical solution for lenders provider about these products and strategies, and if you don't hear from them, you can call me, and my contact information will be at the end of the broadcast.

Alexis Panaro:

All right. Big news in the last few weeks about student loan forgiveness and medical debts. What can you tell us about that? Where is it going to go? What can we expect?

Mike Olden:

Yeah, those are two items that have been in the spotlight nationally over the past couple weeks. I'm sure we'll hear more when I'm back in Washington next month, but last week it appeared that there were some. I think I recall a federal judge who stated that the proposed student loan forgiveness proposed by the previous administration was outside of their authority and that many of those student loans that have been on hold since the pandemic will be back online. And there was some anticipation that there could be quite a few delinquencies because the student borrowers maybe haven't prepared for that or were counting on the forgiveness of those student loans and took the money that they would have made on payments and used it for other items. So I think that's probably a realistic possibility. I think any of our listeners today who have borrowers maybe they even have family members or they have student loans to be prepared that those loans will not be forgiven, that appears to be a strong likelihood.

Mike Olden:

Medical debts we may recall, back in January the CFPB came out and said even though there are existing rules on the reporting of medical debt to the credit bureaus, we're going to go one step further and we're going to prohibit all medical debt from being reported. Well, over the last two weeks, we've seen where, where the CFPB first went on a self-imposed furlough of doing anything, and now today it appears the entire agency may be wound down to nothing. So that rule is really in limbo. The good news for consumers, though, today is, as of 2023, there are two primary areas concerning the reporting of medical debt.

Mike Olden:

Number one all medical collections under $500, paid or unpaid, are prohibited from being reported to the credit bureaus. Number two any medical debt that is over $500 and sent to a collection agency has a 12-month cooling-off period before the collection agency is allowed to report it to the credit bureaus. The reason for that is and I've gone through this, I don't know, maybe you have Alexis or our listeners oftentimes there are a lot of clerical errors between the insurance company, between the insurance company, the provider, the doctor, the hospital, the clinic and the patient. Where things don't get posted in time, they don't get posted at all. Items are transposed, they're deleted in error, whatever the situation may be. Many consumers face that, and I believe I recall last year a statistic came out that about 43% of credit reports had some type of medical debt on there.

Alexis Panaro:

That's crazy.

Mike Olden:

Yeah, now we don't see that after these updates in July of 2023. How did this come about? There were several states' attorneys general who banded together and reached a settlement agreement with the bureaus to implement these changes. So they're not technically laws, it was a settlement. But I think those states' attorneys general had quite a bit of leverage with the bureaus and they reached this agreement.

Mike Olden:

So today we don't see, for the most part, any medical collections on credit reports, and the majority of those were under $100 when they were reporting. A lot of them that I saw were under $30, like a copay, a radiology bill, something very minimal, easy to overlook and forget. And then 60, 90 days later, uh-oh, it's on my credit report and my score drops 50 to 100 points, and that's not an exaggeration. We did see scores drop by that much for a $25 medical collection. So that's the good news. The bigger picture will all medical debt be prohibited? I don't know. We're going to have to see how things shake out with the CFPB, but our current administration is certainly an advocate of less regulation and oversight, even in our industry, so only time will tell.

Alexis Panaro:

Great. Thank you, and again just reiterating that we will hopefully have a live webinar for you at the end of April, early May, that we might have more updates on this, but we'll see.

Mike Olden:

Yeah, exactly.

Alexis Panaro:

What can you tell us about credit score modernization, moving to buy merge reports or anything on that topic?

Mike Olden:

Back in October of 2022, director Thompson at FHFA, who's the agency that oversees Fannie and Freddie, came out with an announcement at the NBA's annual convention that year that finally we were going to see credit score modernization. We mentioned a few moments ago that the current generation of FICO scores used in our industry is about 20 years old and, as a reminder, experian uses version 2, transunion version 4, equifax version 5. In other lending arenas automobile credit card they're typically using FICO version 8 or 9. The most recent version, fico version 10T and again the T stands for Trended Data, which looks specifically at payment patterns on credit card accounts over the past 24 months, and it's currently a Fannie and Freddie underwriting requirement, but it doesn't impact the scores in those older versions of FICO scores. When FICO 10T comes online, it will be calculated as part of the score.

Mike Olden:

The other portion of that is Vantage score, and Vantage scores are the primary competitor to FICO scores. They are owned collectively by the three major credit bureaus and Vantage scores have been around about 15 years. Both scores FICO and Vantage have the same score range 300 on the low end, 850 on the high end. They both have the same five primary attributes that determine the scores, but we want to remember they are different score models and one major difference is if you have a borrower, you pull a credit report and they don't have any score, they don't have any credit, and that is a reality for many consumers.

Mike Olden:

If they opened up a new account tomorrow, say a new Visa account, to generate a FICO score, it takes six months. To generate a Vantage score, it only takes one month. Now I've spoken to some of our underwriting colleagues. They prefer six months of history over one month, but it does generate that score a lot quicker. Originally, those two scores were scheduled to be implemented in the fourth quarter of this year, to be implemented in the fourth quarter of this year. That's now been updated to TBD, so we're not sure.

Alexis Panaro:

Love that TBD.

Mike Olden:

Kind of, we all know how things move in our industry and there's always the great headline, the excitement, the enthusiasm and then the reality of implementation sets in the second part of your question on buy merge credit reports.

Mike Olden:

That was part of this overall credit score modernization announcement where a lender could have the opportunity to pull just two bureaus rather than what we have today, a tri-merge all three bureaus merged into one. That seems to be in the same TBD mode as the actual credit scores and I've spoken again to many underwriters what their preference is. Most of them say their preference is a tri-merge report, so they see the full picture rather than a bi-merge report. But we'll see how this goes. Today Fannie and Freddie are still in conservatorship with FHFA. We don't know the path of the current administration, how that's going to play out, but I don't think we're going to see either piece, probably before the end of this year.

Alexis Panaro:

All right, let's talk about credit repair. I think borrowers sometimes see these opportunities to repair their credit, or you know credit counseling or whatnot, and I think there's been a lot of credit repair scams, so you know, can you remind us again about the dangers of these scams?

Mike Olden:

Yes, and there are a lot of dangers there. Go to the Federal Trade Commission site, ftcgov. Just type in credit repair scams and you'll see pages there of either ongoing or past cases, even the CFPB site. Both of those organizations and the bureaus are very diligent about credit repair companies and what they're offering. What they're implying bait and switch. Is the consumer being required to pay money before any services are rendered? Is the credit repair company asking a lender for a copy of the borrower's credit report? We've heard from our clients that these companies will call them and say just send over a copy of your borrower's credit report, we'll analyze it for free and set up a program.

Mike Olden:

I would ask all of our listeners today if you avoid anything, avoid that. That is not within the terms of the contract with the bureaus, and the bureaus do have the authority to shut lenders off from accessing credit from any source. If you violate that, that credit report that you pull on your borrower is, for you and your successors, a fancy name for your investors. It's not even for your borrower. If your borrower wants a copy of the credit report, the bureaus leave that up to you, other than any specific state regulations and there are some of those. But if the borrower wants a copy of the credit report you pulled, your credit reporting provider should be able to provide a companion credit report that is specifically for your borrower the consumer copy and it's the same credit information but it's formatted differently. There are special messages printed to the consumer. There are truncated account numbers. The social security number isn't listed. That's the version that you should be sharing with the borrower if your company has the policy to do that.

Mike Olden:

At ARC, most of our clients and we have many financial institutions and independent mortgage bankers that are clients their policy is they do not provide a copy. In that case their borrower contacts us, provides a copy of their government issue ID and we send that out. Or our client calls us and says can you send out a copy of the consumer version to my borrower? So we do that. But talk to your own credit reporting provider. That capability should be within their hands. But back to the credit repair scams. I encourage lenders stay away from those companies. The bureaus, the FTC, the CFPB they're watching and they're waiting for a mistake. If your borrower needs counseling, go to HUD's website, hudgov, and search for a HUD-certified counselor and you can look. Every state in the union has them. Here in Washington State, where we're located, there are many of these organizations that have gone through the HUD certification. That's the best place for a consumer to go, or maybe it's the Consumer Credit Counseling Foundation, something that has legitimate designations, authorization to provide that type of help to a consumer.

Alexis Panaro:

Great, thank you.

Mike Olden:

You're welcome. That's my soapbox for today.

Alexis Panaro:

Mike, can you speak to? You know borrowers going out to get their credit score from Credit Karma, let's say, and then you know getting their credit score from their lender and seeing a big difference. You know it's much less than what they saw in Credit Karma. Seeing a big difference. You know it's much less than what they saw in Credit Karma. Can you speak to why that is and what the discrepancy is there?

Mike Olden:

Yes, that is probably in the top three or four questions we receive at ARC from our clients and their borrowers who call us with questions. Borrowers who call us with questions you know places like Credit Karma, or oftentimes you can get your FICO score or a credit score from your credit card issuer, your financial institution. Oftentimes, if not most of the time, those are different score models than what we're using in the mortgage industry. So again, we talked. The two major score models are FICO scores and Vantage scores. Credit Karma uses Vantage scores and our industry uses FICO scores.

Mike Olden:

I've got a couple credit card issuers. I log onto my account site and there might be a little thermometer there that says, hey, your credit score is good, click here to see your specific credit score. Or there's just a button that says see your credit score here, whatever it is, fico, vantage, whatever it is. And then we think, oh well, that's my score. And then they go to their mortgage lender and they pull a credit report and it's different, Sometimes it's lower, and they ask their loan officer what did you do to my credit? Well, they didn't do anything and there could be multiple reasons why those scores are different. They were pulled at different times and not every creditor reports on the same day to the bureaus, or even the same week. It could be some report the first week of the month, some report the last week of the month, so there could be a lot of dynamics happening on when you pull the credit report. So the timing could be a reason. But also it could be a different score model.

Mike Olden:

And even though FICO and Vantage, the two major scoring models in use today in the United States, are very similar same score range, same primary attributes that determine the score they are different score models. So for our lender colleagues on the line today, if you're faced with that situation, ask the borrower where they received that credit score from, credit score from, and it should identify somewhere in the fine print where that score model generated. Is it a Vantage 3.0, vantage 4.0, fico 8, fico 10T or in the case of our industry, it's going to be FICO 2, 4, or 5. And just one item there for our industry even though our industry is still using basically 20-year-old versions of FICO scores, fico still supports those scores fully. It's the same base FICO score, the same score range. We shouldn't be really worried about whether today's version is dramatically different than FICO 10T, but the optics of it are my gosh. Why is the mortgage industry using 20-year-old FICO?

Alexis Panaro:

scores.

Mike Olden:

Well, I think we all want to see the most recent version, but we've got to go through a lot of the protocol that we've discussed earlier.

Alexis Panaro:

I also wonder if it's a if it ain't broke, don't fix it, kind of thing. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, kind of thing.

Mike Olden:

Well, you know some of that could be. Certainly there's going to be costs involved of recalibrating Even. You know for you folks at MGIC, you know building in, you know the new credit scores for pricing engines, los, everything is going to have to take a step back and re-implement those. But we'll get there and there's some great advantages for borrowers who really don't have much if any traditional credit today, really don't have much if any traditional credit today. Those newer versions of scores, if those items are reported, they'll be calculating those in there. So a lot of positives down the line. But it'll probably take some time before we get there. So speak to your legislators, speak to your senators, advocate to them on the trigger leads, advocate to them to expedite using more modern versions of credit scores.

Alexis Panaro:

Great Well, thank you, mike, for your expertise today and answering some of the hot topics. Again, just a reminder that any resources that we touched on will be on the podcast episode page. Look for a webinar, a live session, for end of April, early May, where we'll go over just some updates when it comes to credit reporting and credit scores. And, mike, anything you want to add to close out with. And Mike, anything you want to add to close out with.

Mike Olden:

Well, just to thank you, Alexis, and everybody at MGIC for inviting us to join on the platform here. You folks have one of the best training sites I've seen in our industry. Education is very important to ARC, so we're always happy to join these broadcasts and share the information. And again, I would encourage our viewers today if you have follow-up questions, send me an email, give me a call and we're always happy to help you.

Alexis Panaro:

Great. Thank you so much, mike. We look forward to speaking with you in a month or so. Sounds great, thank you. Thanks, have a great one.

Mike Olden:

You too.

Alexis Panaro:

And this brings us to the end of our episode. For quick access to related content, visit MortgageConnectscom and subscribe to email alerts so that you can be the first to know about new episodes and resources. Thanks so much for tuning in.