Fico

Fico may refer to:

FICO

FICO (NYSE: FICO) is a software company based in San Jose, California and founded by Bill Fair and Earl Isaac in 1956. Its FICO score, a measure of consumer credit risk, has become a fixture of consumer lending in the United States.

In 2013, lenders purchased more than 10 billion FICO scores and about 30 million American consumers accessed their scores themselves.

History

FICO was founded in 1956 as Fair, Isaac and Company by engineer William Fair and mathematician Earl Isaac. The two had met while working at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. Selling its first credit scoring system two years after the company's creation, FICO pitched its system to fifty American lenders.

FICO went public in 1986 and is traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The company debuted its first general-purpose FICO score in 1989. Scores are based on credit reports and range from 300 to 850. Lenders use the scores to gauge a potential borrower's creditworthiness.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac first began using FICO scores to help determine which American consumers qualified for mortgages bought and sold by the companies in 1995.