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Fair Isaac Invented the FICO Score—They’ve Also Patented How to Explain a Credit Score

The company Fair Isaac Corporation is well known as having invented the FICO score.  But did you also know that they invented a process for explaining your credit score?  Yes, it’s strange, but (unfortunately) true.  Here’s a copy of the front page of the patent.  (You can view the full patent here).

Fair Isaac Corporation is the proud owner of U.S. Patent Number 7,280,980 entitled “Algorithm for explaining credit scores”.  The patent specification discusses how Fair Isaac would use a Web site to explain your credit score to you.  Apparently, it ain’t easy to explain a credit score.  Here’s a sample of one of the algorithms that are included in the patent (this one is an algorithm for telling the customer their score, and then explaining areas of possible improvement):

So it takes a rocket scientist to explain credit scores?  Should it really be this difficult?

Even worse, should Fair Isaac be able to control the credit score algorithm as well as the way to explain credit scores?  Seems to us that things are a little out of hand.