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In 1956, engineer Bill Fair teamed up with mathematician Earl Isaac to create Fair, Isaac and Company (later renamed to FICO), with the goal of creating a standardized, impartial credit scoring system.* By 1958, they began pitching their first credit scoring system to 50 American lenders.* Fast-forward thirty years, they created a general-purpose credit score system we now call the FICO system. Since then, FICO has become the industry standard in the U.S., and is used by most lenders, if not all. As of 2020, the FICO score is evaluated by the three major credit bureaus: Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax. These three bureaus share the information on an as-needed basis when a lender, such as a bank, requests for it.