Global Credit Portability: Taking Your Score With You

Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian each operate as separate corporate entities in Canada and in the United States, and the two national bureaus on either side of the border do not share consumer files across the company line. A Canadian arriving in the US with a 780 Equifax Canada score has no FICO score and no VantageScore in the US system until US-domiciled tradelines start reporting. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada have both spoken to this as a long-standing data-portability question that has no policy fix on the immediate horizon.

What does exist is a market for translation. Nova Credit, founded in 2016 and partnered with American Express, HSBC, Verizon, and several US auto lenders, ingests bureau data from issuers in Canada, the UK, India, Mexico, and a handful of other countries and converts it into a US-formatted credit decision. The lender, not the consumer, pays for the data pull. The Federal Reserve has written about cross-border credit reporting in research papers but has not pushed for direct bureau-to-bureau data sharing as a regulatory matter.

What actually transfers, and what does not

Three things travel reliably across the border with the right paperwork. A Canadian credit report printed at equifax.ca or transunion.ca within the last 90 days is accepted by many US underwriters as a supplementary document for non-FICO decisions. Bank-relationship history with a Canadian institution that operates a US affiliate — RBC Bank, TD Bank US, BMO US, and CIBC US among them — can support a credit-card or auto-loan approval in the US arm based on the Canadian file. And character references in the form of bank-issued letters of good standing still carry weight at private banks and credit unions that underwrite manually.

Building a US file from scratch

Most arrivals end up doing both: leaning on the bridge-bank relationship for a first card and a first auto loan, then seeding the US file from there. The Fair Isaac Corporation's FICO 8 and FICO 9 models, still the most widely used in US underwriting, weigh five categories: payment history, amounts owed, length of credit history, new credit, and credit mix. A US file with six months of on-time payments on a single card typically generates a score in the high 600s; twelve months on two accounts with a low utilization ratio commonly reaches the low 700s. After two years, a cross-border mover with no late payments is generally indistinguishable in the data from a US-born borrower of the same vintage.

“Cross-border credit is the largest piece of financial identity that does not yet move with the consumer.”

Pulling the file before the move

Both Canadian bureaus offer free consumer disclosure in writing and online: a printed Equifax Canada or TransUnion Canada report dated within 30 days of departure is a useful artefact regardless of which US lender ends up using it. In the US, federal law under the FCRA entitles every consumer to one free annual credit report from each of the three bureaus through annualcreditreport.com; this is the right page to bookmark before applying for any US-side credit.

One housekeeping note. Identity-theft risk rises during international moves because the change-of-address paper trail is messy. Placing a fraud alert with a US bureau is free for 90 days and renewable; for someone who is mid-relocation and not actively applying for credit, a security freeze is often the cleaner option. Bureau fees and product names change; verify directly with the issuer before paying for a monitoring service.