Your statement is interesting but does not constitute nor provide any substantive information that is backed by evidence. Backup your 'anecdotal' claims.
The gist was that if all their rates are based on a standard formula with no individual discretion, they are safe from regulation around (1) discrimination, (2) risky lending such as led to '08. That sounded more important to them than actually accurate risk modeling, especially since their competitors are all using the same formulas.
(edit: In particular, even if you offered them access to much more effective/predictive data points than the credit score, they would not use them because of (1) and (2) above.)
Large organizations are astoundingly good at finding inefficient ways to spend money.
Equifax is just as shady as those lenders - more so IMO because they have absolutely no obligation or business relationship directly with the individual's whose private data they compromised.
Why am I supposed to take it as a given that if these organizations use the info it must be useful, then?
Regarding the subprime crisis, the biggest victims were the largest banks -- the most sophisticated being put completely out of business -- so not sure what the bit about pension plans comes from (many of those made a lot of money on it).
This isn't necessarily true.
A counterargument is that credit scores offer banks an easy way to outsource what often ends up being a very contentious, politically-fraught process. Yet many analyses have found credit scores barely better than random dice -- the guy with the perfect credit score has a perfect credit score, until he doesn't and there is a wake of delinquency in his wake.
It's also helpful to assess real world motivations. Extraordinarily few of the employees, including at the executive level, at a bank are legitimately concerned about the long term risk to the bank. Success is measured at the quarterly interval, and if you can justify your actions on a quantifiable measure -- even if it's a measure that has little predictive value -- then that's just perfect.
The biggest indicator that someone is a credit risk is that they are maintaining or growing higher interest borrowing products, such as carrying a balance on a credit card. This is an absolute flashing light indication that someone is over-extended, yet the credit monitoring agencies would not bite the hand that feeds them by making too big of a deal about this. Indeed, gross over-borrowing is barely a blip on a credit report, because the people who lend the money ensure that it isn't. The world is absolutely awash in cheap cash and banks are desperate to lend it.
In the wake of the subprime crisis everyone said "oh yes, of course there's a problem there it was the credit agency that was just marking these all wrong", but exactly the same thing is happening on personal credit reports. Of course it is, because the credit reporting agency is there to legitimize whatever the bank wants to do.
What we'd need to demonstrate your claim is for example some data linking credit scores at time of loan to default rate, adjusted for income and loan terms.