One of the best ways to wire your brain with more knowledge on credit and fundability is by joining events and simply listening to specific podcasts. Today, Scott Carson interviews Merrill Chandler—the Founder, CEO, and Chief Strategist of CreditSense, now Get Fundable, and host of the podcast, Are Your F*able? In here, Merrill takes us into the event called FICO World that has been helping many optimize their fundability numbers. With CreditSense being the only consumer facing organization at FICO, he shares to us how he can serve his clients better through constant learning. Merrill then introduces some of the exciting things he is looking at right now, the FICO Boost and the FICO Falcon.
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What Can Be Gained From FICO World With Merrill Chandler
We are excited to have our guests, Merrill Chandler from CreditSense. I give a big shout out to CreditSense for being a sponsor of the podcast. Merrill, you and I spent some time together in Orlando. You’ve got some big things going on with what you’re traveling and adventure going to and all the things you’re implementing. Salt Lake City is where you’re at now, is that right now?
Now, I’m in Salt Lake City. I’m glad to be back. It’s always fun. Your audience are tearing through my podcast. When I do one of your shows, I get this spike in my podcast. Thank you. Keep listening to him because he’s the leader of the pack and I’m here to help you become f*able.
We had a great time in Orlando. You’ve got some great things rock and rolling. Why don’t we first talk about the granddaddy of them all, the big event of the year that you love because it helps you implement and tweak what you do so well? To help your clients and those that are interested in helping to optimize their fundability factors or the fundability numbers and help your students take their credit scores to a whole different level. To get lines of credit, to get approved from bank loans and cheap financing because interest rates are low. Let’s talk about this upcoming event, FICO World that you’re going to.
They do it every eighteen months. They call it FICO 16. It was 2016 and then eighteen months later, FICO 18 and now we’re going to be in New York City, it’s FICO World 19. I’ve got to tell you, the very first one we went to was in Washington DC, FICO 16 and that’s where I met Will Lansing. It’s the story that I tell both in my podcasts and all of yours. By the way, you rank higher on your podcast show for CreditSense or for Are You F*able than I do. This man is the man. I sit at his feet and say, “Teach me how to get my word out to people.” Thank you again.
If FICO 16 was in Washington DC, they rented out the Smithsonian Institution Museum of Natural History. They did all the wings, the Animal wing and the Marine wing. It was crazy. They rented the entire thing out to have their gala party. These people are no joke. It’s through and through. I have a great agenda and I want to invite all your audience to go to CreditSense. If you’re already a member of the Funding Hackers community, you’ll be able to find it there but it’s CreditSense. Go like the page and you’ll get notifications. We’re going every single day.
We’re going to be talking about what we’re learning at FICO World. It is eight hours a day, one-hour segments. I have eight classes times four days where all of the FICO gurus, what I affectionately called the credit gods, the funding gods, all come down from Mount Olympus and meet with us and teach what’s going on. I am thrilled. We’ve been planning on this since we’ve walked out of the last one, a couple of months ago but we are ready to go. I’m going to be doing podcasts and Facebook Lives. You’ve got to go like the CreditSense page. You can get these notifications, these Facebook Lives are going to be us debriefing every class that we come out of. Jessica, my business manager and our referral partner liaison will be there with me. There will two classes. Some we’ll do together and some we’re splitting up like everybody does at a note show where you go and learn all the different things. At your Note CAMPs, you’ve got to split the husbands and wives. Even though Jess and I aren’t married, but we are ready. I’ve never been this ready for a FICO World Conference. Thank you for asking.
We’re excited about the episode with you where you’re going to come and share a lot of the a-ha or the nuggets in the Cliff Notes version of FICO World with the energetic Merrill Chandler there for you.
This one is the prep. I’m telling you what we’re going after. We’ll tell you what the results are in our next show.
One of the things that we talked about briefly in Orlando and you shared this on the previous episode too, that you’re working. FICO has got their 40 points and they’re using AI. If you know how the gamification or how the game works, you can go in and tweak things so that you know how to use those systems to benefit you. When you’ve got a ding or a bad derogatory thing or something like that, you can adjust the credit dials to help overcome that. You’ve got an app that you’ve been working on too and you’re steps ahead of where everybody is all set. Do you want to talk about that?
Scott is referring to what we call the FICO 40. The FICO 40 is an estimate because each bureau, one uses 39 and one uses 42 metrics. We call it the FICO 40 because it’s average across all three bureaus. These are the behavior metrics that are being measured over the course of 3, 6, 12 and 24 months to determine your fundability. We had what we call our black box and we met with program developers so that we can create an app both on the desktop and handheld on your phone so we can do the principles of the basics, the principles of fundability. This app is what we call a rules engine. This rules engine says, “If you have seventeen open credit cards, what do you do? If you have two open credit cards, what do you do?” It’s the rules. Think of it as a target, concentric circles down to the bullseye. There’s what we call a fundability path, an optimization path. If fundability is the bullseye in the middle, then we have an optimization path where every year starting out to bring all those in. That’s what we do with our students at the bootcamp.
That’s what we do with our full service coaching clients so we can coach them, unlimited support to get them to that bulls-eye. We want to move that technology that we use over. It’s probably a 12 to 18-month process but we’re committed to making it more available to our clients. That’s our beta group to make sure all the bells and whistles and all the dial twisting that you’re talking about. Think of it as an optimization path. To use your metaphor, Scott, let’s say there are ten silos with ten points each. The idea is you’re fundable at, let’s say 80. Our objective is even if you have a couple of derogatory accounts that bring your account, you’re paid as agreed to silo is a little lower, all we have to do is make sure that the other silos are hitting on eights and nines in order to compensate for the threes and fours that you might have in any one category. It’s quality of your profile, length of credit, too much available credit, not enough credits. Every silo has a certain value but all fundability means is that you hit that 80 points aggregate across all those of 1 through 10 silos. Does that make sense?
It fully makes sense. I’m imagining a credit fulcrum on one of these teeter–totters. If it’s low here, you adjust this back in here or move the fulcrum over so that these things come in and it comes into balance in place for you.
Fundability is perfect balance. We’re being assigned a platform development manager at FICO who is going to coach us and be our consultant on how to implement our rules into the software so that we can gather the data, create AI and make fundability faster. That’s one of our meetings that we have scheduled at FICO is with our platform development manager. How to take the software on a handheld or the desktop is only how it’s presented to the world. It’s AI engine. That’s FICO. That’s on our thing. We want access to FICO scores instead of just the marketing. The FICO/FAKO scores instead of the marketing scores, we’re going to see what we can negotiate about how do we get the data. If you choose on your app that you want a car, that’s your next purchase. It’s optimized for getting at the vehicle.
We want to be able to use the FICO auto score as the regular update so that we can know when you become fundable as it relates to your score. Remember, generally speaking, scores do not create approvals. They create the rates, the terms, the limits and loan amounts that you get. The approval comes from the lender. Another meeting we have is when we met with them in 2016 but we’ve met with the woman who is chosen to liaison between FICO Development teams and lender underwriting development team. We’re having a deeper dive there than we had the first time. The software is huge but now we’re out of my area of expertise. I know what works for our clients, but translating that into a rules engine and then getting that into software. Those are geniuses in other areas. Mine is developing that rule of engine, that shushing.
One thing I like to ask since this would be the third time you’ve attended. You said you’re the only company, like what you’re doing that shows up to the FICO World. Is that correct?
So far we’ve been the only consumer-facing organization at FICO. Everybody around us, they are the underwriting teams and the programmers, encoders of the Fortune 500 companies and all 5,000 lending institutions in the United States. I do have to tell you the story. I don’t know if I shared this one with you, but FICO 16, Brad was in a course and then Hannah and I were in a separate course and we thought, “This is FICO for beginners.” We sit down and everybody’s pulling out their computers. The names of these courses, sometimes I don’t even understand the depth of them. When Hannah and I were sitting in this course and everybody’s got the computers up. We pull ours up and they’re like, “We’re going to do a dummy click and connect for your API system, for your lending software to our FICO development engine. Let’s go.” Hannah and I are looking at each other going, “WTFMF, I don’t understand the sentence they spoke but I heard API, so I think we’re programming in this course.”
At the first break, we faked it. Unfortunately, I learned this for FICO 16. I learned it for 18 and this one coming up. I do not sit at the front of the room because I don’t want people over my shoulders going, “This guy is an idiot.” I want to keep my ignorance to myself when I’m standing among Titans. We were on the front row, trying to create the impression that we knew what we were doing when there were six rows behind us, a programmer is looking over our shoulders, not knowing a thing. It was insane. At the break, we didn’t come back.
FICO World: Credit scores do not create approvals. They create the rates in the terms of the limits and loan amounts that you get. The approval comes from the lender.
I went to FICOWorld.com and I see their schedule here. It’s defining the new possible decision management platforms and disruptive world, consumer contributed data, ultra FICO, Equifax and FICO, fighting synthetic identity fraud and auto finance, pure tech stories from the front line.
“FICO Research: XNN, Explainable Latent Features NNETS.” “Yes, I’m going to that one.” I have no clue. If you read the small print, it doesn’t help. It does not explain more, but the thing is what I’m able to glean because I connect dots there to learn as much as I can. These meetings are the ones because I’m already on the inside. They said, “We’d like to have you meet with the appropriate team members that you’d like to answer questions, etc. Give us an idea of the scope of those.” I sent them a big old email saying, “Here are the questions, here’s the scope. I would like a podcast with Will Lansing if I can for 15 to 20 minutes on the thousand-foot view of FICO fraud prevention strategies and how those benefit borrowers.” I want the man himself to say, “We’re here to support borrowers, and fraud prevention is how we do it.”
Ethan Dornhelm who’s the chief scientist of the FICO, I want to meet with him on the future implementation of FICO reason codes beyond the current 40 plus or minus. The FICO 150 we’ve talked about. I want to know what they’re casting forward on that because we’re already optimizing for the vast majority of those 150. I only got confirmed, he is the SBA, Small Business Association liaison with FICO because they’ve used SBSS, the Small Business Scoring Service. We’re talking about the schedule of rollout among financial institutions.
I know they’ve been taking over the market space, but I want to know what we can count on over the next 2 to 3 years. I’ve already got one scheduled. I’ve got two more on deck and I’m going to get some ad hoc ones. I promise. I’m going after at MyFICO.com‘s president so that we can talk about how they’re serving the people. I go even if I can’t understand every word that’s coming out of their mouths at the classes. I go to have these meetings and find out so we can serve our students, our clients and your audience. I want people to know that there are possibilities that they’ve never even dreamed of.
You’ve got that coming up and then you’ve also got to be up in Ohio near Louisville, Mason, Ohio near Cincinnati for the big event OREIA that they put on every year.
The OREIA, the Ohio Real Estate Investors Association is our biggest event of the year and we’re going to be there. In 2018, we had 300 people in my presentation. We’re going to try and beat that. I’m going to give you an email address. If any of your audiences have another place in the country that make the Bismark Dunkin Donut. The only place I’ve ever found the Bismark Dunkin Donut cream-filled maple bar and chocolate bar is in the Great Wolf Lodge, Dunkin Donuts on site. I’ve looked everywhere. That’s some BS. I don’t know why, but it’s the Bismark and I’m looking for it. If any of your audience does have it, you can send it to Info@CreditSense.com. Fire me an email and tell me that your city has it and if I’m in your city, trust me, I’ll invite you up for one.
You’re also going to be out in San Diego at Magnify Your Wealth with their buddy Aaron Young.
If you’re going to be at OREIA, come to the booth. Let’s talk. If you’re going to be at Aaron Young’s Magnify Your Wealth, let’s talk. I’m also going to Pitbull, which is in Phoenix, Arizona. The fall is always my busiest event and presentation season. I’m gone for the next two weeks straight. After FICO World and Aaron Young ends on Saturday and I’m back on Sunday. It’s literally fifteen days on the road.
That’s a beautiful thing because it’s a busy time of year. There are bigger events in November and October as people start prepping for 2020 and that’s a big thing. You’ve got something else that you’re working on, something that you’re boosting, is that correct?
One of the things that’s super hot right now is what’s called the FICO Boost. You’d scroll through one of those topics, but FICO Boost is where they’re bringing in other data to round out your credit score. This is for people who do not currently have access to credit because they don’t have a car, don’t have a house, but they faithfully pay their utilities, cell phones, etc. It is not a heavy implementation. It’s not going to get your business lines of credit, just having to boost data. You have to be a professional borrower. That’s what we teach at the bootcamp. That’s what my podcasts are all about, how to become a professional borrower.
We have our schedule for this fall, a podcast that does a deep dive into FICO Boost because what they’re doing is trying to be inclusive. They’re getting merchants to report credit profile data or payment history to be added to the 24-month lookback period. If you’re paying rent and they’ve even engaged their outfits out there that you pay a service but you pay your rent to the service and they pay it, they report your rent payments on time to FICO. They’re trying to be more inclusive for borrowers so that people can get a car or get a home, get a mortgage but do know that there are limitations to that boost. There are classes on it that we’re taking, but that’s also one of the subject matter experts that I’m looking to meet with what is the crossover point? Am I going to get a $10,000 credit card or am I going to get a $30,000 credit card using boost data and those types of things?
We can add them to our rules engine in-house and then optimize our clients for that. We can take brand new clients, the children, real estate investors, the note buyers, the children who are starting to build. We can start with boost level stuff and start upgrading when their fundability gets higher and higher. That’s one of the big projects we’re working on is how do we expand our base so that it’s not just real estate investors, entrepreneurs, business owners, but how do we get folks who are starting out like college students? How do we get single moms? How do we optimize it and how do we offer a product that makes them an intelligent, powerful borrower and stay within their $2,000 a month budget?
I don’t have that product yet. I want to make sure that we’re not leaving anybody behind in the fundability world. One of my avatars is the single mom that’s low income, who’s fighting to make ends meet. I want her to have the tools necessary to become fundable as she grows and grows and a fundability path for her. That’s one of our 2020 expansion markets that we’re working on. I’ve got to get the details so we could optimize for folks that right now we’re leaving behind. There’s no borrower left behind and that’s no joke. That’s what I’m all about.
One of the two things that we’re implementing too. I’m putting this out there because it gets crossover is that for those of you that are existing clients of CreditSense, but also we’ve got some crossover with clients of Laughlin Associates. If you’ve signed up for the corporate veil protection with Laughlin, they’ll report it to the credit bureaus for your entity or your name for your business so you can start building business credit that Merrill can then use to help get your lines of credit. People didn’t know this and we talked about this a while back, but Madison Management, which is our big servicing company. I talked to Shante Duffy over there and asked her about, “Who do you report to?” She’s like, “We want to report to TransUnion and the mortgage stuff.” I said, “I reached out to Merrill. If I technically take a property and owner finance it to my entity or my entity owner finances a property to me because I don’t have any mortgage on my credit and have them both go. We’re automatically withdrawing on an asset.” It doesn’t matter what it is for the most part.
As long as they’re reporting in your name to your Social, it doesn’t matter.
It’s a beautiful thing to boost your fundability factors as long as it’s on time and reported there, but you can set it up on automatic to take care of things. I only bring that tied in because I know a lot of people out there are looking at things or stressing about bills or stressing about financing. They’re wanting to do some big things in the New Year and if you start putting those things together the next 60 to 70 days before the year out, you can start off 2020 in a whole different pattern. Merrill’s team can do an amazing job with those extra lines of credit that are reporting on your behalf to make 2020 a great fundability especially with the credit rates and interest rates being so low across the board right now.
It’s very favorable for borrowers and borrowing. One thing I do want to follow up on that conversation is, what can we do to get that outfit reporting to all three bureaus? When they only report to one, they create a range differential. We need that mortgage, we need that rent for that leasing. We need that on all three because that’s a high-ticket item. Those are $50,000 $100,000, $300,000 properties and those are highly contributable. How do we find the right outfit or how do we get them to report to all three because it doesn’t cost to be a subscriber, it costs to pull credit? How do we do that? You can hook me up with that individual. I’m happy to make that call.
FICO World: It doesn’t cost to be a subscriber, it cost to pull credit.
That’s an easy thing. It will be an email in your inbox in two weeks because you’ve got enough stuff going on.
Send me that as soon as you can because I can make that call while I’m traveling.
What else have you got going on? Have we covered everything? You’ve got the app and you’re going to FICO World.
I don’t know if they’re going to answer it because I’m the only one who uses this metaphor and they certainly don’t use this metaphor. Everybody that I have a podcast interview with, I’m going to ask them. “If FICO World is the Olympus of the credit and funding gods, which deity do you most relate to?” I am going to ask that question. If I get the opportunity to meet with the CEO, Will Lansing, I’d love fifteen minutes. I hope they can make that happen. If I can get Will Lansing, I’m going to tell him he’s Zeus. I’m just saying, “I tell my students, my audience, my podcast audiences, that you are the Zeus of the credit and funding world and the predictive analytics world,” and we can go from there.
One last thing. We talked about FICO Falcon is Fraud Detection Software. They have not scheduled this one yet, but my intention is a deep dive into what are the data points that they’re collecting. What’s the relationship with the application score? Get under the hood instead of going, “This is a great Hemi 450 engine. I want to start taking this thing apart and seeing how deep they’ll go.” I have an NDA with them. I would love to find out how deep this rabbit hole goes with FICO Falcon. I believe I have come up with a way to bulletproof a PCID, a Personal Credit Identity using the FICO Falcon but I haven’t bounced it off of them yet. That’s a huge opportunity for me as well.
Most people may not know this, but you’ve launched your own podcast too.
It’s on all the platforms. It’s called Are You F*able?. That’s been the placeholder because we needed to get the podcast out, but we didn’t do any survey. We didn’t talk to our audience. I believe in asked campaigns to say, “What strikes your fancy?” On my book release, we have the publisher in play. They’re doing the ISBN number and Library of Congress stuff. All of that is getting done. I know it’s real now. Words on a page is not a book, an ISBN or whatever. Your registration with the Library of Congress and that means you’re legit. I’ve written a book. Go to GetFundable.com. That’s another announcement is the Funding Hackers is all in play. I don’t know if it’s forwarding yet to Funding Hackers. Funding Hackers is our community because we want to build that brand, but that brand is the community of becoming a funder and knowing the inside secrets. It’s like Insiders.
We finally got Get Fundable purchased. We had to buy that baby but it was worth it because that’s our command to ourselves and to everybody in our lives. Get Fundable is our rallying cry. Funding Hackers is the community of people who are on-board and just going for it. You have to have gone to the bootcamp and be subscribed members. It’s $29 a month to be a part of the Funding Hacker Group. Some of our branding has changed. I always want to wait until it’s perfect. People saying 90% now is better than 100%, two weeks or a month or whatever from now. There are some branding movements and evolution to get us all in line. We didn’t want to do anything until we could purchase that URL. It’s done and it’s forwarded and we’re killing it.
You’ve got 30 episodes already out there, so it’s a great way to binge and you’ve got some great topics on there. You’ve got a lot out there for you to binge and learn a lot and be educated on what Merrill’s experiences, team experience there for you. There’s great stuff out there. I’ve been bingeing and I love it. The energy comes through. Do yourself a favor, go over and check it out. Listen to it, subscribe and leave a couple of five-star reviews.
Listen and subscribe to the podcast. Go to CreditSense Facebook page at Facebook.com/CreditSense and like it so that you can stay on board with the play by play, moment by moment in FICO World. Make sure you’re tune in and figure all that out. We will be back from FICO. That’s going to be a rager of a bootcamp because I’m going to be back from FICO. I’ll rework my deck. The presentation is going to take on subtly or a hugely different tone. I will be coming down from the mountain of the credit gods.
You’ll be delivering the credit ecstasy to your audience and attendees.
To understand that reference, go to my podcast and listen to the origin story. You’re going to love it. That’s it for me, Scott. You’re my superhero.
You are doing an amazing job and rock and rolling out there. If you’re reading this episode, this is the first time you’ve read it, you’ve got your hair going there. Take the opportunity and go check it out. You can check out some of the previous episodes of Merrill. This is your 9th, 10th time to be on the show at least. That’s not counting Note CAMPs and other things that we’ve done with you as well. Take advantage of the thing to learn, go live stream, listen to what Merrill is doing and sharing. If you’re in those other areas, like we said, San Diego, check out Magnify Your Wealth.
I’d love to shake your hand and meet you and find out what’s in your way. What the landmines are that you’re stepping on and how we can at least keep you in one when you go visit with a lender and get approved instead of denied. That’s our end game here.
Do yourself a favor. Make sure you get plenty of rest, hydrate, plenty of emergency or vitamin C while traveling. We don’t want you to get sick and you’ve got a busy stretch ahead. We look forward to having you on in a couple of weeks. We’ll schedule that for later in November. It gives an opportunity to go through because you’ve got a lot of things going on. I’m looking forward to hearing all the good stuff you’ve got going on and getting updated on all the new nuggets when it comes to being fundable here.
Scott, this is awesome.
Thanks, Merrill. I appreciate it. Everybody, go out and check out Are You F*able? podcast. You can check it directly at FundingHackers.com. It’s a great place to be in. It’s a great way to learn and listen. Go in straight to the website and you’ll see the most current episode at the bottom of the website where you can listen to it and subscribe. Go on over to iTunes and leave a five-star review for Merrill and his amazing team of funding experts to help you take your business to the next level. Go out and take advantage of it. I know we’re coming when you read this, either November or December or later on, take the opportunity to plan out and prepare to make 2020 great. The last time you want to do is be looking at your life at the end of 2020 because hindsight is always great. Get some pre-sight versus hindsight in your business life. We will see you later. Go out and make something happen. We will see you all at the top.
Important Links:
- CreditSense
- FICO World
- Funding Hackers – Facebook
- FICOWorld.com
- MyFICO.com
- Ohio Real Estate Investors Association
- Info@CreditSense.com
- Magnify Your Wealth
- Pitbull
- Laughlin Associates
- Madison Management
- FICO Falcon
- Are You F*able?
- Facebook.com/CreditSense
- FundingHackers.com
- iTunes – Are You F*able?
- www.GetFundable.com
About Merrill Chandler
For over 25 years, Merrill Chandler, a co-founder of Lexington Law Firm, has been the pointy-edge-of-the-spear regarding the education of Borrowers in how to improve their borrowing opportunities and success.
During that time, Merrill developed a process to optimize personal and business credit profiles to improve a borrower’s “Fundability.” Based upon this concept, he founded GetFundable.com to deliver his revolutionary technology to entrepreneurs, business owners, and real estate investors who want easy, no-hassle, approvals.