Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background.

Would open source credit score formulas be feasible?
Has this already occurred, if not: why? What are the road blocks? I think it's just that the barriers to entry are rather high.  Lenders would potentially be interested in a new score if it demonstrably saved them money (by more effectively weeding out risky borrowers), but because the FICO score already exists and they already know how to use it, there are costs and risks in making the transition, so lenders are unlikely to switch without solid evidence.  But to get solid evidence, you would need to test out the new score and see how well it correlated with loan default and so forth.  So there is a catch-22: no one will use the score until they know it works, but you can't know whether it works until people start using it. The existence of non-FICO credit scores (like VantageScore) shows that it is possible for alternatives to crop up.  The question is just whether they have enough concrete advantages to overcome the track record and name recognition of FICO.  Only time will tell. As for why an alternative score wouldn't be open source, you could ask the same about almost anything.  Creating a measurably better score would likely take lots of time and money (to gather and analyze data both on characteristics of borrowers and on their record of debt payment).  If someone is able to do that, they would probably rather do it secretly and then milk it for billions by selling the results of the secret for a long time without selling the secret itself, as FICO has done.