NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — With the economy slumped and unemployment soaring, credit unions can't afford to wait to re-evaluate the credit scores within their portfolios, one analyst said at NAFCU's 42nd Annual Conference & Exhibition.

Sarah Davies, senior vice president of analytics and product management at VantageScore Solutions LLC, said that recent events should alert credit unions to the need for carefully analyzing the risk they have in portfolio. For example, she said that a credit union that set its credit score floor for mortgages at 750 between June 2003 and June 2005 would have about a 0.4% risk of default. However, that same score between June 2006 and June 2008 raised the risk of default up to 2.4%.

Highlighting California, Davies said the risk of default on a mortgage for credit scores as low as 591 was only about 0.4% between June 2003 and June 2005. More recently (June 2006-June 2008), that rate has skyrocketed up to 10%. Even the top-tier score holders have reached 0.5% risk of default, where they were previously zero.

Complete your profile to continue reading and get FREE access to CUTimes.com, part of your ALM digital membership.

Your access to unlimited CUTimes.com content isn’t changing.
Once you are an ALM digital member, you’ll receive:

  • Breaking credit union news and analysis, on-site and via our newsletters and custom alerts
  • Weekly Shared Accounts podcast featuring exclusive interviews with industry leaders
  • Educational webcasts, white papers, and ebooks from industry thought leaders
  • Critical coverage of the commercial real estate and financial advisory markets on our other ALM sites, GlobeSt.com and ThinkAdvisor.com
NOT FOR REPRINT

© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.