The creditor may examine your past credit history to evaluate how promptly you pay your bills and look at other factors as well, such as the amount of your income, whether you own a home, and how many years you have worked at your job. A credit scoring system awards points for each factor that the creditor considers important. Creditors generally offer credit to those consumers awarded the most points because those points help predict who is most likely to pay back the debt. In smaller communities, shopkeepers, bankers, and others who extend credit often knew by word of mouth who paid their debts and who did not. As some creditors became larger and as the number of their consumer credit applications grew, these creditors needed to establish more systematic and efficient methods for evaluating which consumers were good credit risks.
Credit scoring is one such technique.
Although smaller creditors still may rely on informal credit evaluations, many large companies now use formal credit scoring systems. Most credit scoring systems are unique because they are based on a creditor's individual experiences with customers. To develop a system, a creditor will select a random sample of its customers and analyze it statistically to identify which characteristics of those customers could be used to demonstrate creditworthiness. Then, again using statistical methods, a creditor will weigh each of these factors based on how well each predicts who would be a good credit risk. To illustrate how credit scoring works, consider the following example that uses only three factors to determine whether someone is creditworthy.