Free Credit Score Anytime, Anywhere

A credit score is a three-digit number calculated to indicate your creditworthiness. The higher the score, the more creditworthy you are to a lender. A credit score is calculated from the information in your credit report and considers your on-time payments, the length of your payment history, your mix of different types of credit accounts, and other such factors. It is important to know that your score does not take your age, income, employment, marital status, or your bank account balances into account.

You can learn more about credit scores and scoring models from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau website:  https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ask-cfpb/what-is-a-credit-score-en-315/

VantageScore® was founded by the 3 leading credit reporting agencies – Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. This credit score model was developed by a representative team of statisticians, analysts, and credit data experts from each of the credit reporting companies, and is used by hundreds of institutions, including credit unions, banks, credit card issuers, and mortgage lenders.

The VantageScore® 3.0, the score that is shown in SavvyMoney, is a newer and more popular version of VantageScore®. It is calculated on a scale of 300-850, with 300 being the lowest and 850 the highest score.

The credit report provides all the information you would find on your credit file, including a list of open loans, accounts, and credit inquiries. You can see details on your payment history, credit utilization, and public records that show up on your account. There is never a negative impact to your credit report or credit score when you access them through Heartland.

No. Credit Score tools are a free service to all members of Heartland Credit Union

No. Accessing your credit is a “soft” inquiry, which does not affect your credit. Lenders use “hard” inquiries to make decisions about your creditworthiness when you apply for loans.

As long as you regularly log on to online or mobile banking, your credit score will be updated every month and displayed for you in digital banking. You can click “refresh score” as frequently as every day in the Credit Score widget. Refreshing your score does not negatively affect your credit score or credit health. You can check it every day without worry!

Our credit score tool pulls your credit profile from Transunion, one of the three major reporting bureaus, and uses VantageScore 3.0, a credit scoring model developed collaboratively by the three major credit bureaus.  This model seeks to make score information more uniform between the three bureaus to provide consumers a better picture of their credit health.

Unlike other larger credit score tools, such as Credit Karma, Heartland does not share any of your credit information with other parties.

There are three major credit-reporting bureaus—Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion and two scoring models: FICO or VantageScore—that determine credit scores. More than 200 factors in a credit report may be taken into account when calculating a score, and each scoring model may weigh credit factors differently, so no scoring model is completely identical. No matter what credit bureau or credit scoring model is used, consumers fall into specific credit ranges: Excellent 781–850, Good 661-780, Fair 601-660, Unfavorable 501-600, and Bad 500 or less.

No, Heartland uses its own lending criteria for making loan decisions.

Heartland and your Credit Score widget uses bank-level encryption and security measures to keep your data safe and secure. Your personal information is never shared with or sold to a third party.

Our credit score tool is not intended to be comprehensive and may not provide all the information about your credit accounts. That’s why we encourage you to take advantage of obtaining free credit reports from www.annualcreditreport.com to look for any incorrect information or discrepancies across all three bureaus. However, you can initiate a dispute of a credit report error by clicking “Start a Dispute” at the bottom of the credit report within the Credit Score widget. Even though your dispute is initiated through your TransUnion credit report within the widget, the dispute will be sent to all three credit bureaus. Bear in mind that each credit bureau has its own process for correcting inaccurate information. For more information about correcting errors on credit reports, visit www.FTC.gov, the Federal Trade Commission website.