FICO has released a new product to help lenders figure out which consumers are most financially resilient and therefore better able to weather a financial crisis; called the Resilience Index, ten years in the making, it scores consumers on a rating of 1 to 99 with lower scores being better; it looks at length of credit history and in particular credit utilization to determine this new index score; Jim Wehmann, executive vice president of FICO Scores, said, “We now can predict which consumers are best positioned to withstand a downturn and which ones are not so well positioned. The FICO Resilience Index can allow lenders to keep credit flowing to even low FICO scorers and below-average FICO scorers who we can identify for the very first time that they are resilient.” Washington Post.
