FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores

Why do some ancient traditions ban usury?

I suspect actually MOST ancient traditions ban usury (or ban lending altogether). Christianity banned usury, Islam banned essentially all lending, Hinduism banned some casts from lending and regulated the lending of others[1].

I think the practice was found to be corrosive to societies and thus at one point or another many of them tried to ban it. (Lending is also very helpful for commerce, so most societies also reintroduced it. Actual practice varied at different points in history.)

1. https://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/sbe14/sbe1405.htm

There are regulations around it even today. It's not a complete free-for-all. https://www.paidnice.com/usury-laws-by-state

But to answer the question, there's quite an instinctual aversion to earning money through apparent idleness. Same reason that people hate landlords who just get "passive income" simply for owning. (Of course the owner had to buy it in the first place, or had to inherit it - and indeed inheriting too much stuff also rubs people the wrong way - except if they themselves are blocked from passing on their things to their kids).

Same reason that merchants were distrusted, since there was no concept of economics that would allow them to understand that in fact trading and arbitrage is actually valuable contribution for the market to properly price goods, and is a much better way to price things than gut feelings about "sentimental value" or the labor theory. But this was not well understood so making money through trade was seen as witchcraft. How come he can come to the village and buy our pig for X and then go sell it for X+Y in the city? I mean that's somewhat understandable, the transport etc. Income through interest doesn't even have that. Of course the real value proposition is again a kind of resource allocation cognitive processing. The lender's contribution is in the assessment of prospects of the profitability of a venture. That apparently this is not the case in many consumption credits is indeed some kind of system failure, and some perverse incentives set up by regulations, where somehow the financial companies are not punished by reality for misallocating. See 2008 etc.

If you look up the various means of buying home without having all of the money up front that are compliant, it’s just a mortgage by different name.

https://www.guidanceresidential.com/resources/faith-based-fi...

All Abrahamic faiths ban lending where the returned amount is greater than that borrowed, i.e. charging interest. Judaism "worked around" it by banning it amongs Jews but allowed lending on interest to non-Jews. Christianity originally followed Jewish law in this regard but abandoned it later on. Islam, adheres to banning interest strictly, but this is subject to different interpretations. E.g., buying an item at a higher price but paying in installments is allowed by some schools of jurisprudence, while others disallow it, while there is unanimous condemnation of a loan whose interest "doubles and redoubles" [explicit in the Quran], which is the typical credit card or mortgage. The main difference in buying at a higher price + installments from a conventional interest based lone is that the profit gets agreed to at sale, and it holds regardless of whether the full payment is made early or not.

Muslims have got around the problem of not being able to pay for houses in cash by constructing a joint ownership scheme, where the lender and buyer enter into a joint ownership of the house; the buyer pays rent and adds extra to buy more equity, and the rent goes to both the buyer and lender in proportion to their equity as a business partnership. Over time, the rent part decreases and the equity buying accelerates. There are other models, but this is the most popular one. Due to Federal and state laws, such mortgages are often reported with interest rates even though, technically, interest is not being charged.