Five years ago a FICO score cost a mortgage lender about 60 cents per pull and nobody in the business thought about it. In 2026 the same pull lists at $10, and last quarter that one price line drove a 49% jump in FICO's business-to-business scores revenue, per the company's own earnings release. Then a federal regulator wrote a few sentences on social media and took the pricing power away. That's why we built Winvesta Crisps, to decode what's actually driving the companies you own, in plain language, before the consensus catches up. 60,000+ investors from all over India are already in. What about you?
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Most investors file Fair Isaac under analytics software: a company that sells decisioning tools and happens to own a famous three digit number. The last four quarters say something else. Scores revenue rose 41% to $458.9 million in the June quarter while the software half of the business grew 2%, per FICO's earnings release, and almost all of the Scores growth came from charging more for the same mortgage pull rather than selling more of them. On Thursday evening, 3 September, the Federal Housing Finance Agency instructed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to accept rival VantageScore 4.0 from every mortgage originator, effective immediately. FICO closed Friday at $932.26, down 16.68% on the day and roughly 53% below its 52 week high of $1,998.01, per stockanalysis.com. The company is still highly profitable. The thing that made it exceptional was a rule.
🧩 What FICO actually sells
Fair Isaac runs two segments, and they could not be less alike.
Scores is a licensing business. FICO does not hold your credit data. Equifax, Experian and TransUnion hold the data. FICO owns the algorithm that turns that data into a number, and it collects a royalty every time a lender pulls a score. There is close to zero incremental cost in the transaction, which is why the company reported an operating margin of 53.8% for the June quarter, per its earnings release. Scores splits into business-to-business, meaning lenders, and business-to-consumer, meaning the myFICO subscriptions sold directly to individuals.
Software is the part that looks like a normal enterprise vendor. FICO Platform sells decisioning, fraud and originations tooling on a recurring contract, alongside a shrinking book of older on premise products.
The June quarter, fiscal Q3 2026 for FICO, ended 30 June and was reported on 29 July. Total revenue was $674.2 million, up 26% from $536.4 million a year earlier. Scores contributed $458.9 million of that, up 41%. Software contributed $215.3 million, up 2%. Inside Scores, business-to-business revenue rose 49% and consumer revenue rose 5%, all per the earnings release.
Read those two lines next to each other and the shape of the company becomes obvious. Two thirds of revenue comes from the licensing segment, that segment is growing at twenty times the rate of the software segment, and mortgage originations account for more than 60% of it, per FICO's disclosures and analyst summaries of the quarter.
The software story is genuinely improving underneath the flat headline. Platform annual recurring revenue grew 62% and carried a dollar based net retention rate of 148%, meaning existing platform customers spent about half again as much as they did a year before. The problem is the other half of the book: non-platform ARR fell 17% with retention of 82%. Net out the two and total software ARR grew 10%, per the earnings release. That is a decent software business being dragged by a legacy tail, and at $215.3 million a quarter it was never going to carry the valuation on its own.