chuck.jones

Subprime Fallout: Good For Countrywide, Bad For Choicepoint, Bankrate

This blog contains several errors about ChoicePoint which require correction.

The author's presumption of ChoicePoint’s involvement in the subprime mortgage market is grossly overstated. Our company is not “very heavily levered towards subprime.”

On January 24, ChoicePoint’s management laid out for investors the details of its Marketing Services business, which is the segment most directly tied to the subprime mortgage industry. During this conference call with industry analysts, we reported that 30 percent of the Marketing Services’ 2006 segment revenues of $79.7 million (or less than 3 percent of ChoicePoint’s annual consolidated revenues) came from mortgage customers and that this portion of the segment’s revenues was down 35 percent from our 2005 results.

Also, this blog incorrectly stated that “a few million identities were stolen” in the fraudulent data access incident which ChoicePoint disclosed in 2005. The fact is that we provided notice to fewer than 170,000 individuals who MAY HAVE BEEN affected by this incident. The number of individuals actually affected is estimated by various government agencies to range from about three dozen to as high as 1,000 consumers.


ChoicePoint has spent a lot of money and time to improve our products and enhance existing policies and procedures, so that even our harshest critics now acknowledge ChoicePoint as being a role model for our industry. To read a New York Times article on this topic, please go to www.choicepoint.com/ne.... To read a report written by the independent research firm, Gartner, go to www.choicepoint.net/ch....

Thank you.

Chuck Jones, ChoicePoint