From scores to lens alignment: why FIS retired the universal score

If you've opened FIS recently, you'll have noticed the biggest change we've made since launch: the 0–100 FIS Score is gone. In its place, every company is now measured against the criteria of your investing lens — and the same company will read differently for different investors, by design.

Why we retired the score

A single number carried two problems we could no longer ignore.

It pretended one answer fits everyone. A dividend-focused investor near retirement and a growth-focused investor in their twenties are not asking the same question of a company. A universal score forced both questions through one formula and gave both investors the same answer.

It read like a verdict. However carefully we framed it, a high green number looks like "buy" and a low red number looks like "avoid". FIS is an analysis platform, not an advice service — and we'd rather change the design than rely on a disclaimer to undo what a colour scheme implies.

What replaced it: your lens

When you set your preferences, FIS derives your lens — growth, value, income, conservative, or balanced. Your lens determines which of the nine fundamental criteria matter most in your view of a company:

Core criteria — the checks your lens weighs most heavily. The headline count ("Meets 4 of 6 core criteria") is measured against these.
Supporting criteria — checks your lens considers with lighter weight.
Not part of your lens — checks your lens deliberately doesn't judge either way. The Growth lens, for example, doesn't weigh valuation multiples — growth investors accept paying up for expansion, so the multiple neither helps nor hurts.

Each criterion compares one reported financial metric against a defined threshold and lands as Met, Borderline, Not met, or No data. Every claim on the page is a checkable fact about reported financials — not an opinion about the investment.

Changing your lens is as simple as editing your preferences.

The evidence behind the lens weightings

The weights behind each lens weren't hand-picked. We calibrated them against ten years of point-in-time S&P 500 data — nearly 60,000 monthly company snapshots — and validated them on data the selection process never touched. Some of what we found:

Companies that ranked highly under a lens went on to outperform companies that ranked poorly under the same lens in out-of-sample testing across the most recent decade.
The income and conservative lenses — the ones built around downside resilience — were also tested through the 2008–09 financial crisis, where their top-ranked companies lost meaningfully less than the market average. (That historical window has a known limitation: data for companies that delisted during the crisis is unavailable, which we disclose in our methodology.)
Perhaps most interestingly: when we let an optimiser search for "perfect" weightings, it found combinations that looked spectacular historically and fell apart on new data. The lens weightings that survived validation are the simple, hypothesis-driven ones. We kept those, and we publish the methodology.

None of this is a prediction or a promise about any company or any future period. It's the standard of evidence we hold ourselves to before changing how FIS measures anything.

What this means day to day

Ticker pages show how a company measures against your lens criteria, with every criterion explained.
Your watchlist shows core-criteria counts instead of score badges, and your daily brief reports when a specific criterion changes — "Debt / Equity: not met → met" — instead of a number moving.
Compare shows two companies' criteria side by side.
One thing to keep in mind: alignment is personal. Your "5 of 6" and a friend's "3 of 6" for the same company aren't disagreement — they're different lenses doing their job.

As always: FIS describes how companies measure against criteria. What you do with that information is, and stays, entirely yours.