# What This Bill Actually Does

This bill asks two government agencies—the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission—to study whether credit scoring companies should start using additional information when deciding your credit score. Right now, credit scores are mostly based on your traditional credit history: whether you pay credit card bills on time, how much debt you have, and how long you've had credit accounts. This bill wants to explore what happens if credit scoring models also look at other financial behaviors you already have.

The study would examine eleven different types of financial information that credit companies could potentially consider. These include things like your rental payment history, whether you pay your utility bills on time, your subscription service payments, your bank account activity, how often you get paid, your insurance payment history, and even peer-to-peer payment activity like Venmo transactions. The bill also mentions "Buy Now, Pay Later" services—those services that let you split purchases into installments—and government benefit payments. Essentially, the government wants to understand how including this broader picture of your financial behavior would change who gets approved for loans and at what interest rates.

The practical impact could be significant for millions of people. If credit scores start incorporating rental and utility payments, people who have never had a credit card but always pay their rent and bills on time might suddenly have better credit scores. This could help people access loans, credit cards, and mortgages more easily. On the flip side, if your bank account shows frequent overdrafts or irregular income, that could potentially hurt your score. The study is meant to figure out whether these new factors would actually help lenders make better decisions or if they might unfairly disadvantage certain groups of people. The agencies have until the end of 2025 to complete this research and report back to Congress.

To require the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection and the Federal Trade Commission to conduct a study on use of additional key factors in credit scoring models, and for other purposes.