Pinnacle Finance Blog

March 20, 2016

Improving Credit Trends for U.S. Consumers

Good news for dealers looking to grow business by offering financing options to potential buyers – the average FICO credit score, a key component to financing decisions, is at an all-time high in the US.  Based on a recent FICO blog there has been significant improvement in FICO scores since the Great Recession.  The national average FICO score in April 2015 is at an all-time high of 695, up from a low of 686 in October 2009.   The data for those two time periods also indicates that 19.9% of the population has a credit score of 800 or higher, […]
September 15, 2017

Avoid the Dreaded “Credit Freeze”: What You Need To Know About the Equifax Security Breach

  Background information: On September 7th Equifax announced that it had suffered a data breach from mid-May through July that potentially impacted 143 million US consumers.  The data accessed by the criminals includes names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, and addresses.  Equifax also said the breach involved some driver’s license numbers (although it didn’t say how many or which states might be impacted), credit card numbers for roughly 209,000 U.S. consumers, and “certain dispute documents with personal identifying information for approximately 182,000 U.S. consumers”.  Equifax has provided a website with further information on the data breach, https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com/.   Additionally, this article, https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/09/the-equifax-breach-what-you-should-know/, […]