The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
VantageScore Solutions hires new CEO
STAMFORD — Creditscoring provider VantageScore Solutions announced the hiring of financial services veteran Silvio Tavares as its new chief executive officer and president, marking the Stamford-based company’s first CEO change since its 2006 founding.
Tavares takes over a firm that is owned by national credit-reporting companies Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.
“I am thrilled to be taking the helm of VantageScore at a time when the opportunities for the company have never been greater,” he said in a statement. “We will build on the momentum that the company has achieved and intensify our focus on innovation, data-driven outcomes and financial inclusion while continuing to provide lenders with best-in-class predictive credit-scoring models across all scoring ranges.”
Tavares formerly served as founder, CEO and chairman of the Digital Commerce Alliance, a global trade association whose member companies include Bank of America, Discover, MasterCard and Microsoft. He has also served as a senior executive at Visa and Fiserv/First Data and authored or co-authored more than a dozen patents in financial-data analytics.
Barrett Burns, the founding CEO and president of VantageScore, has taken the new position of vice chairman. In its announcement of the CEO change, VantageScore said that under Burns’ leadership it has played a leading role in “the unprecedented access to free credit scores and the development of models that are able to safely and soundly score consumers who are ‘credit invisibles’ when conventional, legacy credit scoring models are used.”
“I have relished the opportunity to create a national brand from scratch and to position VantageScore firmly in the mainstream credit ecosystem,” Burns, a Greenwich resident, said in a statement. “I am particularly proud that since we launched the company in 2006, we have doggedly pursued financial inclusion and developed models that are able to score 96 percent of all adults 18 years and older in the United States without sacrificing safety and soundness standards.
“As usage of our models continue to grow, I have been heartened that the financial services industry has recently become more focused on this important issue, and I step down knowing that VantageScore is in Silvio’s capable and creative hands.”
In its announcement, VantageScore also cited a study released in 2019 showing that about 12.3 billion VantageScore credit scores were used in the 12-month period ending in June 2019. During that time frame, the company said that its credit scores were used by more than 2,500 “unique entities,” including 2,200 financial institutions.
“I would like to thank Barrett for his over 15 years of distinguished service to the financialservices industry and for leading the charge to create an environment where competition and innovation thrive amongst credit score model developers,” Tavares said.
In response to an inquiry from Hearst Connecticut Media about the extent of its local presence, a VantageScore spokesman confirmed that the company remains based in Stamford, but he declined to disclose the address of its offices as a “security precaution.”
The spokesman also declined to disclose the company’s number of employees, but he said that “our data scientists are based throughout the country, and we have some staff based in Stamford.”