FICO Plunges as US Opens Mortgage Scoring to VantageScore

Tuesday, 29 September 2026. The big mover on Wall Street today is not a tech giant but the company behind America's credit scores. FICO shares have crashed after Washington moved to loosen its grip on mortgage lending, while a cancer drug maker and a fuel cell company are among the day's big winners. Here is what is going on.

FICO plunges as regulators open the door to VantageScore

Fair Isaac shares plunged 18% by midday, and were down as much as about 27% at one point, after Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte announced changes to how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac price mortgages (CNBC, Yahoo Finance).

• Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will replace their two separate pricing grids with a single grid (CNBC, Business Insider).
• That grid will incorporate VantageScore, the rival model created by credit bureaus Experian, Equifax and TransUnion, alongside FICO Classic (Investopedia).
• Until now, FICO has been effectively the standard score used to price mortgages backed by the two agencies.

Iovance soars on a big guidance raise

• Iovance Biotherapeutics raised its 2026 total revenue guidance to $410 million to $420 million, from $350 million to $370 million, citing strong US demand (Iovance press release, Yahoo Finance).
• The shares were up 26% by midday, according to CNBC, and Yahoo Finance data showed gains of around 35% at one point.

Other big movers

• Bloom Energy jumped 13% after Jefferies raised its price target to $264 from $229, and the city of Fremont said the company had bought a 158,000 sq ft facility to expand (CNBC).
• Oracle rallied more than 5% after launching Fusion Claw, an agentic AI system that combines AI reasoning with conventional enterprise computing, with 25 new agentic applications (CNBC, Yahoo Finance).
• AI infrastructure names also gained: Lumentum rose 6%, Nebius 4% and CoreWeave nearly 2% (CNBC).

The wider market

The broader market was slightly lower. At 11:42am ET the S&P 500 was down 0.25% at 7,665, the Nasdaq was off 0.10% and the Dow was 0.54% lower at 51,205, with Treasury yields still near their highest since 2007 (Yahoo Finance).

Sources

• CNBC - Stocks making the biggest moves midday: Carnival, Fair Isaac, Bloom Energy, Iovance
• Yahoo Finance - Stock Market Midday, 29 Sept
• Investopedia - The US moves to end FICO's mortgage scoring monopoly
• Business Insider - FICO stock plummets as credit reporting for mortgages gets shaken up
• Iovance Biotherapeutics press release (GlobeNewswire)
• Yahoo Finance - Oracle jumps 5% as Fusion Claw launch adds 25 agentic applications