Alternative Credit Score Aimed at Underserved Market.

Fair Isaac & Co. Inc. here has created a new credit score which is generated from nontraditional sources.

Tom Grudnowski, chief executive of Fair Isaac, said the new product, FICO Expansion Score, "sets a new standard for helping the underserved marketplace."

Mr. Grudnowski and Craig Dillon, vice president for scoring solutions, told a press teleconference on the new product that there are 50 million American consumers who do not have enough data in one of the credit repositories to generate a traditional credit score.

The new product uses the same scoring range as Fair Isaac's NextGen product. In the spectrum of credit risk products from the company, the traditional FICO score comes from a data file with sufficient information. NextGen can generate a score from some files that have a thin data. The Expansion Score product works with files that have no data or thin data.

Mr. Dillon said the company has seen most of its interest in this product from the mortgage industry.

As it has launched the product, it has been in discussions with the government-sponsored agencies and others in the secondary market. While there has been considerable excitement about the product, no secondary market participant has signed off on it yet.

Another note of caution Mr. Dillon gave was not to confuse the Expansion Score with being a product for borrowers with poor credit. "This is not subprime," he said in response to a question about borrowers who are scored with this product being stigmatized.