This week, Susan Fahy, EVP, and Chief Digital Officer at VantageScore joined Chuck Jaffe on the “Money Life” podcast, in which she covered December 2023 VantageScore® CreditGauge™ insights and the credit tiers experiencing the most stress after the holiday season.
“Delinquencies continued to rise across all products in December, in particular with consumers continuing to spend over the holiday season. Credit card balances are up 8.2% year over year. We’re seeing credit utilization, which is the percentage of outstanding credit that folks are accessing, also inching up. As we enter into 2024, all signs point to a credit hangover for consumers.”
Susan also points to an unexpected trend identified in the December 2023 CreditGauge analysis.
“It was interesting to see that lenders continued to grant new credit and open new credit cards where we would have expected a pullback. New account originations are not as high as a year ago, but they increased in December 2023 from the prior month. Banks are continuing to be willing to lend, but as delinquencies continue to rise particularly around lower-income and younger consumers with lower credit scores, it’s concerning. We’ll have to see what happens in January.”
Listen to the episode here. Susan’s comments start around the 31-minute mark: Macro Tides’ Welsh: ’17-year cycle’ calls for a peak, a correction, then a long downturn