Convert Vantage to Fico

How to convert vantage to Fico? I often get this question in the mail. Even though Vantage and Fico are quite similar, they use different formulas and don’t weigh things the same. Thus, convert Vantage to Fico and vise versa using the following methods only for kicks, not for accuracy or any other practical purpose.

Which VantageScore is this?

First thing you need to know is which Vantage score you wish to convert to fico, because not all Vantage versions use the same scale. While VantageScore 1.0 and 2.0 rage from 0 to 1000, the newer versions VantageScore 3.0 and VantageScore 4.0 (introduced in 2013) use the same scale FICO uses, 300-850, so that conversion between them is straight forward and very easy. More information on VantageScore 4.0 can be found here.

That having said, the two most common ways for converting between the old Vantage 1.0 & Fico are range conversion & direct linear conversion.

Range Conversion

In this method you first determine which range your Vantage Score 1.0 falls into, and then translate that range to the appropriate Fico range.

For example, as illustrated below, a Vantage score of 750 falls within the ‘Prime’ range, which corresponds to the Average/Low Fico range, i.e. 580-680.

This method has 2 main drawbacks:

• Unlike Vantage 1.0, Fico scores categories are not divided equally among the score scale.
• While Vantage 1.0 has 5 risk categories, Fico has 6.

Direct Linear Conversion

This method uses the following formulas to convert Vantage 2.0 to Fico and vise versa:

• FICO = (Vantage – 501) * 1.12 + 300
• Vantage = (FICO – 300) * 0.89 + 501

For example, a Vantage score of 814 converts to a Fico of 650 using: (814 – 501) x 1.12 + 300 = 650. A Fico score of 681 converts to a Vantage of 840 using: (681 – 300) * 0.89 + 501 = 840.

Although linear conversion is very simple, it doesn’t account for the differences in how each score weighed various factors. Thus, the resulting FICO score is likely to be different from your ACTUAL FICO score, and more often than not these formulas seem to yield drastically unexpected results.

Bottom Line

Converting Vantage 2.0 to FICO is not like converting Celsius to Fahrenheit. These scores use different models, different weights and even distributes scores in a different manner. Try the conversion for kicks, but not accuracy.