FICO Announces Plan to Add BNPL to Credit Score Calculations

Following a joint study with buy now, pay later (BNPL) firm Affirm, FICO has said that it is planning to add BNPL data to its credit score analysis.

The analytics firm said in a Tuesday (Feb. 4) news release that over the course of a year, it had studied how BNPL usage — if incorporated into its FICO scoring system through a simulation — could raise FICO scores for some new BNPL borrowers.

“Given the growing popularity of BNPL loans, understanding how to effectively capture the benefit that BNPL data can have on FICO Scores is crucial to all stakeholders in the credit ecosystem,” said Ethan Dornhelm, vice president of scores and predictive analytics at FICO, in the news release.