Consumer access to credit, housing, insurance, basic utility services, and even employment is increasingly determined by centralized records of credit history and automated interpretations of those records. Credit histories in one form or another have long been an important factor in decisions to extend or deny credit to consumers 1 . Historically, such decisions required a skilled, human evaluation of the information in an applicant’ s credit history to determine the likelihood that the applicant would repay a future loan in a timely manner. More recently, computer models have been developed to perform such evaluations. These.
