As someone that has worked as a regulator/auditor with OCC, FRB and FDIC, I can assure you there is no grand conspiracy. There are competitive pressures to capture market share, which are healthy and normal in an industry. Where the conspiracy creeps in is that there is high level of regulation, which lends itself to regulatory capture and the largest banks have the funds to lobby heavily for their interests. This also takes place in other industries, but when there is money involved it suddenly becomes evil and driven by conspiracy.

Scores like FICO are empirically proven to assess credit risk using a very large training sample over a very long time. If you want to crow about FICO holding people back, focus on credit education and not the big, mean banks and lenders that shut out lower credit quality applicants who have abused their credit history and creditors. Also, the marketplace lenders like Funding Circle, Lending Club, Kabbage, etc. are developing their own scores, but it will be years until they are as refined and predictive of credit risk as FICO given their current sample size.