This is technically true but extremely deceptive if you don’t know the history. From “Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America” (Lauer, 2017; Columbia University Press):
Chapter 3: “By the late 1890s systems for evaluating the credit risk of individual consumers existed in metropolitan centers throughout the United States.”
Chapter 4: “During the early twentieth century millions of Americans came under the watchful gaze of newly formed credit bureaus. But these bureaus were only one arm of the emergent consumer credit apparatus. Their counterpart was the credit department of individual stores, where credit managers interviewed, documented, and tracked customers for their own benefit and that of the local bureau.”
Credit reporting has existed for a very long time in the US. So while a computerized score wasn’t there until the late 1950s (basically as soon as such a computerized score could exist, underscoring how eager banks were to implement it), your comment being technically true has no real impact on the argument of the merits of credit scoring.
Equifax was founded as the Retail Credit Company by Cator and Guy Woolford in Atlanta, Georgia, as Retail Credit Company in 1899. By 1920, the company had offices throughout the United States and Canada. By the 1960s, Retail Credit Company was one of the nation’s largest credit bureaus, holding files on millions of American and Canadian citizens. Even though the company continued to do credit reporting, the majority of its business was making reports to insurance companies when people applied for new insurance policies, such as life, auto, fire and medical insurance. RCC also investigated insurance claims and made employment reports when people were seeking new jobs. Most of the credit work was then being done by a subsidiary, Retailers Commercial Agency.
People latch onto the fact that credit scores were invented and ignore decades of credit reporting prior.
The US credit score system is from the 60’s. Things worked just as well before it existed…
This is technically true but extremely deceptive if you don’t know the history. From “Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America” (Lauer, 2017; Columbia University Press):
Chapter 3: “By the late 1890s systems for evaluating the credit risk of individual consumers existed in metropolitan centers throughout the United States.”
Chapter 4: “During the early twentieth century millions of Americans came under the watchful gaze of newly formed credit bureaus. But these bureaus were only one arm of the emergent consumer credit apparatus. Their counterpart was the credit department of individual stores, where credit managers interviewed, documented, and tracked customers for their own benefit and that of the local bureau.”
Credit reporting has existed for a very long time in the US. So while a computerized score wasn’t there until the late 1950s (basically as soon as such a computerized score could exist, underscoring how eager banks were to implement it), your comment being technically true has no real impact on the argument of the merits of credit scoring.
From Wikipedia about the history of Equifax:
People latch onto the fact that credit scores were invented and ignore decades of credit reporting prior.
I didn’t think it started in the US until the late 80’s.
The modern version we know is from the late 80s.
before, bankers used other ways to discriminate, such as (and if you know anything about US history this should not be a surprise) being Black.
not to defend credit scores. they suck. but what existed before sucked too and we shouldn’t go back to them.
Redlining still happens today. They just discriminate in more ways now.