FICO sells credit reports in Spanish (AP)

By CANDICE CHOI, AP Personal Finance Writer Candice Choi, Ap Personal Finance Writer – Mon Jan 23, 12:10 pm ET

NEW YORK – Credit reports are now on sale in Spanish.

The company behind the most widely used credit scores, Fair Isaac Corp., plans to announce Tuesday that its consumer website and products are available in Spanish for the first time.

FICO says the prices and products are the same as on the English version of the site.

The Spanish language version, which went live for testing in October, was designed to mirror the English language version, said Amber Minson, general manager of FICO's consumer scores. She said the financial educational materials on the site are direct translations as well.

The rollout of the myFICO en Espanol comes at a time when the Hispanic population is expanding rapidly.

Over the past decade, census figures show that Hispanics have accounted for more than half the U.S. population increase and now make up 16 percent of the population, up from 13 percent a decade ago.

To accommodate the growing number of bilingual customers, FICO says visitors to its site can now toggle between the English and Spanish versions of its site. The site is available at espanol.myFICO.com or by clicking the "Espanol" tab in the top right corner of the myFICO.com homepage.

Visitors to the site will want to carefully review their options before making any purchases. FICO offers several products that differ significantly in price, so customers should first determine the level of credit monitoring they want.

The most basic option on myFICO is to purchase a FICO score and report for $20; that includes an explanation of the positive and negative factors affecting the score.

But the site also offers more elaborate credit monitoring services, with monthly packages that require at least three-month subscriptions. A Suze Orman package, which includes three FICO scores and three credit reports, costs $49.95.

If a Spanish translation isn't a must, consumers should take advantage of their rights to a free annual credit report from each of the credit reporting agencies before paying for any credit products. The reports can be accessed at www.annualcreditreport.com.

Those who are in the market for a loan may also get free copies of their credit scores from lenders, depending on the type of loan they're applying for and the terms they're given. Credit reports and scores are also available for free from other sources.

The credit monitoring website CreditKarma.com, for example, offers users unlimited access to free scores and reports. Users do not have to give their credit card information; the site makes money through credit card advertising.

The scores provided by CreditKarma.com are VantageScores, rather than the widely used FICO scores. But a VantageScore can give borrowers an idea of where their credit stands.

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Candice Choi can be reached at www.twitter.com/candicechoi.

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UK sells bailed out bank Northern Rock to Virgin (Reuters)

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain has agreed to sell nationalized lender Northern Rock to Virgin Money, the banking arm of Richard Branson's Virgin empire, in a loss-making deal that marks the start of the government's exit from banks it bailed out in the 2008 crisis.

The disposal will fetch between 747 million pounds and 1 billion pounds ($1.2 billion - $1.6 billion), Britain's finance ministry said on Thursday, representing a 400 million pound loss on the 1.4 billion pounds in equity pumped into the lender by taxpayers.

"The sale of Northern Rock to Virgin Money is an important first step in getting the British taxpayer out of the business of owning banks," Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne said in a statement.

Virgin Money, also backed by Texan private equity tycoon Wilbur Ross, had faced competition to buy Northern Rock from NBNK, an investment vehicle set up to create a new retail bank by buying assets from bailed-out incumbents.

British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg said the Virgin Money deal was the best available.

"The strong recommendation made to us was that this was the best value for taxpayers," he told reporters.

"Of course we have an over-riding duty to provide good value to taxpayers and that's what we sought to do through this decision."

The Northern Rock sale was handled by Britain's UKFI organization, which was set up to manage the state's holdings in banks bailed out during the crisis.

INCREASED COMPETITION

The combination of Northern Rock and Virgin Money should increase competition in British retail banking, challenging the dominance of HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group, Santander and Royal Bank of Scotland, the UK Treasury said.

Virgin Money currently offers mortgages, credit cards, savings and insurance products by telephone and over the internet to about 3 million customers in the UK. Buying Northern Rock will give the business a branch network for the first time.

Its chief executive Jayne-Anne Gadhia will run the enlarged lender from Northern Rock's existing base in Newcastle, north-eastern England.

Virgin Money has pledged not to make any further compulsory redundancies from the combined bank, and to maintain Northern Rock's existing branch network.

Northern Rock, a former mutual that used cheap wholesale credit to grow aggressively in the British mortgage market, was nationalized in early 2008 after banks abruptly stopped lending to each other in the credit crisis, starving it of funding.

Prior to the government's intervention, customers queued at Northern Rock branches to withdraw their money in the first run on a British bank in many decades, triggering a steep fall in financial markets.

The British government still holds an 83 percent stake in RBS and 41 percent of Lloyds, a legacy of its efforts to prop up the banking sector during the financial meltdown. ($1 = 0.633 British Pounds)

(Additional reporting by Adrian Croft and Steve Slater; Editing by Paul Hoskins and Jodie Ginsberg)

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Goldman sells mortgage unit Litton for a loss (AP)

NEW YORK – At least one of Goldman Sachs' bets on the subprime mortgage business turned out to be a bust.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said Monday it had agreed to sell its subprime mortgage servicing business Litton Loan Servicing to Ocwen Financial Corp. for $264 million. That's much lower than the $428 million Goldman paid for the company in 2007. Goldman also assumed $916 million in debt when it bought Litton. On Monday, Goldman wouldn't say if it still held the debt.

Goldman made substantial profits in 2007 in trades against mortgage securities. That year, it also decided it was a good time to buy Litton, which collects payments from subprime mortgage accounts. However, Litton didn't turn out to be lucrative for Goldman and attracted unwanted attention from regulators.

Goldman said it doesn't expect the sale to have an impact on its earnings. The company already took a write-down in the first quarter that was mostly related to Litton.

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