FHFA readies two-bureau mortgage credit reports; TransUnion rises 3% anyway after a 12% slide

The Federal Housing Finance Agency plans to direct Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to accept "bi-merge" credit reports, built from two of the three national credit bureaus, instead of the "tri-merge" report that combines Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, a person familiar with the plans told Bloomberg, according to HousingWire. The change could be announced by FHFA Director Bill Pulte at the Mortgage Bankers Association conference in Chicago on October 12 and would take effect one to three months later, Bloomberg reported.

The plan is not yet official. FHFA did not respond to HousingWire's request for comment. Pulte said on social media in early September that the agency was "seriously considering" bi-merge, and has written that the three bureaus "have been overcharging Americans for far too long."

The thing the headlines got wrong: the stocks fell before the report

The Bloomberg report landed after Thursday's close, so Friday was the first session to react. By late morning it was not much of a reaction. TransUnion was up 2.9% at $63.96 at 11:51 a.m. New York time and Equifax was down 0.5% at $138.98, according to Nasdaq quotes.

The real damage came earlier in the week, around the time Pulte said the GSEs would use a single pricing grid that treats VantageScore 4.0 as equivalent to Classic FICO, which we covered when Fair Isaac fell 21%. Using Nasdaq's daily closes:

Bi-merge was not a surprise either. HousingWire notes it was on the table under former FHFA Director Sandra Thompson before being delayed over implementation problems, and Pulte raised it publicly in September. Some of the risk was already in the price.

What a bureau stands to lose

Under bi-merge a lender picks two of the three bureaus. If lenders split their choices evenly, each bureau would be dropped from about a third of GSE mortgage files, our arithmetic. They will not split evenly, which is the point: the bureaus would compete on price for the two slots.

Neither company breaks out mortgage revenue in dollars in its earnings release, so the exposure cannot be sized precisely from public figures. What the Equifax second-quarter release does show is how much mortgage has been carrying growth: US mortgage revenue rose 25% from a year earlier and mortgage revenue in its credit-bureau unit, US Information Solutions, rose 40%, against 11% growth for the whole company's $1.70 billion in revenue. The TransUnion release says FICO mortgage royalties, which it bills and passes through, add about 2 percentage points to its third-quarter growth and about 3 points for 2026. A bureau left off a file loses that pass-through revenue as well as its own report fee.

What a borrower or a broker saves

Each tri-merge report carries three credit scores per borrower. When FICO launched direct licensing in October 2025, it set two pricing options for tri-merge resellers, according to The MortgagePoint: $10 per score, or $4.95 per score plus a $33 fee per borrower per score when the loan closes.

Dropping to two bureaus removes one score per borrower. On the per-score plan, that is $10 saved per borrower on every application, including the ones that never close. On the performance plan, it is $4.95 at application and $33 at closing. For a married couple who close, that is $75.90, our arithmetic. Those are score fees only; the bureaus' own report charges vary by reseller and are not published, so the full saving is larger by an amount we cannot verify.

For a small mortgage brokerage, the application-side saving is what matters, because it is paid on every pull. A shop that runs 100 borrower credit pulls a month on the $10 plan would save about $1,000 a month in score fees alone. For a buyer, the saving is real but small next to a closing bill. It will not move a rate, which Freddie Mac put at 7.28% this week.

What to watch

The MBA conference on October 12, the effective date if it is announced, and whether Fannie and Freddie let lenders choose any two bureaus or set rules on which pair. We also explained how the VantageScore change hits brokers and self-employed buyers in this Main Street piece.

Sources: HousingWire (citing Bloomberg), Nasdaq price data, Equifax and TransUnion second-quarter 2026 earnings releases via SEC EDGAR, The MortgagePoint. Calculations are ours. This is market information, not investment advice.