Experian Company

Hoping to buy his first home this year, Ralph Bustamante paid off his credit cards and cleared dings on his credit report to ensure that he'd be able to get a loan. Bustamante had hoped to pull his FICO scores, used by most lenders as a standard of creditworthiness, from the three major credit bureaus so he could negotiate the best possible mortgage rate. Make that two credit bureaus. One of the companies, Experian Group Ltd., will stop selling FICO scores to individual consumers Saturday.

For seven years, a bill collector enabled by the powerful Experian credit reporting bureau pursued Maria Pintos over a $3,000 towing bill. "They used to call me at work and threaten to ruin my good credit," Pintos, 71, said of Pacific Creditors agents who hounded her at her San Mateo County mental health department job for months after the May 2002 towing. "It was so embarrassing, because there were patients around who could hear." On Thursday, the 71-year-old Pacifica, Calif.

In a rare victory for a consumer fighting to protect his credit score, a three-judge federal appeals panel in Pasadena slammed Experian on Tuesday for such carelessness that it refused to send the case back to the trial court, saying "no rational jury could find that the company wasn't negligent." Even rarer, the appeals panel's decision was a reversal of a ruling it had made just four months earlier.

The nation's three biggest credit-reporting firms said Tuesday that they would standardize how they calculate consumer credit scores, with the goal of making the numbers easier for lenders and borrowers to understand. The joint move by Equifax Inc., Experian and TransUnion also amounts to a competitive challenge to Fair Isaac Corp., the developer of the well-known FICO credit-scoring system.

Borrowers have less than 10 days to see their FICO credit scores calculated by Experian Group Ltd., one of the three biggest personal credit-rating bureaus. Experian notified Fair Isaac Corp., the Minneapolis credit-rating company, in January that it was terminating its contract Feb. 14 to provide information to MyFICO.com, the website operated by Fair Isaac that enables consumers to look at their scores, said Craig Watts, public relations director for Fair Isaac.

An Irvine company has settled charges that it tricked consumers seeking free credit reports into signing up for a credit monitoring service that costs $79.95 a year, the Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday. Under the agreement, ConsumerInfo.com Inc., a unit of Experian Information Solutions Inc., is required to provide refunds to consumers and to pay the government $950,000 in "ill-gotten gains."

Credit reporting company Experian has acquired Los Angeles-based shopping-comparison service PriceGrabber.com for $485 million in cash. PriceGrabber provides shopping and product information to more than 300 websites. Experian, which has its U.S. headquarters in Costa Mesa, is best known for its credit-data business but also operates LowerMyBills.com and Classes USA.com.

Part of running a business is knowing who is and isn't a good credit risk. Two Internet services can help you get a snapshot of your customers' credit-worthiness. Experian (http://www.experian.com) and CreditFYI (http://www.creditfyi.com) provide business credit reports over the Web. Both use the same raw data, which are collected by Experian, but they report the data in very different ways. Neither provides a great deal of detail, but Experian provides more.

Credit information giant Experian Inc. has signed a memo of intent to acquire the credit card and check processing unit of French banking industry leader Societe General for $110 million. Completion of the deal is expected later this month. In addition to processing financial instruments, the 1,400 employee SG2 unit compiles and markets consumer and business information databases. Experian, a subsidiary of Great Universal Stores PLC in Great Britain, maintains its U.S. headquarters in Orange.