Conflicting credit scores cause confusion
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Bureaus are expected to increase their marketing efforts for the VantageScore, and they say there's good reason: It's easier for the consumer to understand, and the bureaus use it as a teaching tool. Rod Griffin, manager of public education for Experian, says his company's VantageScore buyers are shown an explanatory Web page. "There's the scale -- ABCDF," Griffin says.

Someone with a VantageScore in the 600s can see that "a 601 to 700 is a D, by letter grade," Griffin says. "What a D means is it's a subprime or nonprime score, and those people fall into the bottom 38 percent of the population." The Web page explains that lenders are likely to offer D scorers "somewhat-less-favorable terms to compensate for higher default rates in this category." There are tips for raising one's credit score.

All well and good, but the VantageScore still confuses some people who are getting ready to apply for mortgages.

"They need to advertise in great big letters that this score is meaningless when they apply for mortgages," says Michael Moskowitz, president of Equity Now, a mortgage lender in New York City. "A lot of people are finding themselves in this situation -- they think they have this score and they find out the true FICO score is different."

What do mortgage lenders think?
People in the mortgage industry say there's no chance that home lenders will adopt VantageScore. They will stick with the FICO score because it has proven to be accurate. "With billions and billions of pieces of data, it's becoming more and more refined with each transaction," says Dan Green, mortgage planner with Mobium Mortgage in Chicago. "How is the industry going to turn its back on that?"

The credit bureaus are aware that VantageScore won't be accepted by mortgage companies any time soon, but they are marketing it to other industries, such as the credit card and auto industries. "When you get outside mortgage lending, it's a more open marketplace, and many different scores are used," Griffin says. Standardization might save money.

A little history: For a long time, the credit bureaus resisted letting consumers see their FICO scores. In 2001, California passed a law requiring the bureaus to disclose credit scores to residents of that state. It was easier to make the scores available to everyone rather than only Californians, so the bureaus flung open the doors. They quickly discovered that millions of consumers were willing to pay to see their scores.

But, the FICO scoring scale was counterintuitive, and bureaus had to share revenues with Fair Isaac. VantageScore was developed to address both of those issues.