Your Personal & Business Credit Matters.

(FICO® SBSS℠ score) is one of the main business credit scores lenders may use. It’s a credit score small business owners should know about if they are considering a small business loan through a traditional lender such as a bank, or certain SBA loans. But many entrepreneurs have never heard of it because it’s been hard to get your hands on it.

Banks aren’t required to disclose that they use the FICO® SBSS℠ score and FICO doesn’t sell this score to borrowers as it does with consumer scores that it sells through myFICO.com. More lenders are using it because it helps them make faster, more accurate lending decisions. This means they can make decisions in hours, not days.

The FICO SBSS score ranges between 0 to 300, with 300 being the highest score. A higher score indicates lower risk.

The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) requires lenders to use this score to pre-screen certain SBA 7(a) loans:

Current minimum SBSS scores:

• 7(a) Small Loans: 155
• Community Advantage: 140
• Express Bridge Loan Pilot Program: 130

If your score falls below their required threshold, it doesn’t necessarily mean your application can’t be approved. To continue, your loan application then must go through a manual approval where other factors may be taken into account.

FICO doesn’t have any credit information, it just provides the formulas used to calculate credit scores. The information it uses to calculate this business score comes from credit reporting agencies, the lender or other data sources. SBSS models use up to four types of information. 

• Consumer credit reports for the principals/guarantors of the business (up to five owners),
• Business credit reports for the business, 
• Application data supplied on the loan application, and 
• Business financial data
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Of these, FICO says that the credit information that is most important in terms of helping predict performance are the business owner’s personal credit data followed by business bureau data, financial data, then application data.

If you have no business credit history and limited time in business, you may be able to get a passing FICO SBSS score based on stellar personal credit alone. But it helps to have strong business credit as well.

Banks and lenders can set up the SBSS model they use in different ways, putting more weight on certain information, and less on others.

For example, it can put more weight on your business credit profile or more on your personal credit history. It’s also a very “smart” business credit scoring model because it can automatically go from one business credit bureau to another, in whatever order of priority the lender prefers, until it’s able to generate a score.

So, if the lender prefers using Experian for business credit data as the default, it can pull that data from Experian data. But if that report doesn’t provide enough information, it can automatically get business credit data from Dun & Bradstreet. If there’s not enough business credit data available, it will just use the personal credit data to calculate the SBSS score, potentially along with business financials. 

Currently, FICO SBSS can be calculated using consumer credit data from Experian, Equifax or Transunion as well as business credit data from Dun & Bradstreet, Experian Business or Equifax SBFE. 

Application data can include business checking account balance , time as current owner and principal’s combined net worth.

Because the lender has a choice of credit bureaus to use when accessing data to create this score, your business does not have a single FICO SBSS score. In addition, it will change as information in your credit reports change.