business

How do you say credit score in Russian? FICO score.

Minneapolis-based Fair Isaac Corp. announced Thursday that it has partnered with the National Bureau of Credit Histories, Russia's largest credit bureau, to bring credit scores to the country by the fall. Fair Isaac, the analytics software company best known for its FICO credit score, is entering Russia's financial services market at a time when the "credit bureau reporting infrastructure has only begun to emerge," said Tom Quinn, Fair Isaac's vice president for global scoring.

Also emerging is Russia's middle class, whose strong income growth in recent years (fueled in part by oil exports) has helped them accept using credit to buy consumer goods.

The FICO score is currently used on four continents in dozens of countries -- from Singapore to Turkey to Jamaica.

Previously, Fair Isaac CEO Mark Greene has said that China, India and Brazil presented big opportunities for the company, which aims to shift its revenue from two-thirds originating in North America to two-thirds international.

The company has struggled to grow revenue for several quarters, and recently announced a reorganization designed to improve the company's performance. Before the partnership, Quinn said that in Russia, some big banks used internal modeling to assess whether a borrower was a good credit risk, while smaller banks might rely on knowing a customer personally.

Fair Isaac is not the only U.S. credit company with scoring interests in Russia's burgeoning credit market; the three major U.S. credit bureaus also have interests there. In 2004, Experian, another domestic credit bureau, started a Russian bureau based in Moscow, and TransUnion helped establish the National Bureau of Credit Histories in 2005. Last month, Equifax acquired a stake in Global Payments Credit Services, a Russian credit information company. In 2006, the three announced VantageScore, its own domestic credit score to rival the FICO.

Kara McGuire • 612-673-7293