The FHFA was right to open the door to VantageScore. The time for credit-score competition has come.

I could not disagree more strongly with Will Lansing’s letter “A Risky Race to the Bottom on Housing Credit” (July 16). FICO Classic was the only mortgage credit score broadly used during the 2008 crisis. In my view, FICO Classic was a deficient mortgage credit score then and it has become outdated since.

Antitrust regulators pursue monopolies for good reason. They can lead to price gouging and low-quality products. Unlike VantageScore, FICO Classic excludes large numbers of creditworthy Americans - especially renters - from mortgages.

Well-functioning markets and economies require good data and competition. The Federal Housing Finance Agency made the right decision in allowing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to guarantee mortgages based on VantageScore 4.0. The policy opens the market to the power of additional information, including rental data.

More data reduces risk for the mortgage system. Major banks have concluded that VantageScore 4.0 is more predictive of consumer credit delinquency than FICO Classic. An independent analysis from the Urban Institute found including rent reporting in credit-score calculation helps more Americans access mortgages.

The time for competition in mortgage credit scoring has come.

By Silvio Tavares, President and CEO of VantageScore, in a letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal

For more information on VantageScore 4.0 implementation, please visit VantageScore’s Mortgage landing page.