No Credit Score WTF?

The Sandbox General
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Just applied for a joint credit card with my wife from the bank I’ve done business with for over 50 years! I already had a credit card in my name with her as an authorized user. She wanted it a joint account so that she could view it online without pretending to be me. OK with me, but bank cannot switch an account from individual to joint, even if we both requested the change in person. So we had to reapply, and did, in person.

Adding a WTF? (or several WTF?s) Even though we applied in person and the bank manager knew each of us, we still had to call later to verify our identity. And we had to call them, rather than answer a call, because they called and left a message on our land line. That’s because the land line number was prefilled onto the credit card application, without ever asking us what phone to use for the application, and the land line was already in the bank’s info for our account. And remained with the application, even though during the credit interview we changed the phone number for the bank to use to contact us.

So I called. Just had to answer some stupid multiple choice questions, basically like with a credit report request. (But before I could even speak to a human on that route, I had to provide my birthdate, zip code, and SSN) Five questions, as I recall, four of which were “None apply”. (Things like about a mortgage I requested in 2021, and there was no such mortgage - I had encountered such questions before, and they did upfront say perhaps none would apply.) Fifth was “which of these is the zodiac sign for you birthday?” WTF? I had provided the birthday already, so in this specific case the question was not a check on my birthday. I pointed that out, and interviewer said “Yes, it’s silly, but Experian specifies the questions we must ask.”

Experian? For additional WTF? complications (these Experian’s fault, not the bank’s), we had already established that the bank would be using Transunion, not Experian. Fortunately, I passed the zodiac sign test.

Now the important WTF? issue. Each of us received a letter from the bank yesterday, saying “Your credit score is not available from TransUnion, which is a consumer reporting agency, because they may not have enough information about your credit history to calculate a score.”

WTF? They have years of credit information on us, as do the other agencies. I just ordered (free, once a year) my credit report from TransUnion. Looks OK to me. Even if there were something wrong, they could certainly calculate a score, even if the value had some error in the result.

I do know I have a score, a very good score, from Experian.

[And bonus WTF? We were quite concerned about the letters, and still are, but later the same day we received the snail mail we received e-mail confirmation that the new card had been approved, though the credit limit is ridiculously low. Maybe because they couldn’t get a credit score.]

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All I can think is, how much available credit do you currently have? I assume you may not have a mortgage any more. Is your credit card maybe the only credit you’ve had open for a few years?

Even if the bureaus are giving you good scores on thin data, I could see the bank not accepting 1 credit card as enough of a file. I believe closed CC accounts are removed from consideration after 2 years, unsure if closed mortgages, etc. do the same.

If you have multiple lines of credit, no idea.

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My experience with this is that some banking institutions simply do not report financial information to credit bureaus. I’d had a credit union credit card for a decade that didn’t show up on transunion reports simply because they didn’t share the information with transunion.

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I just used Lending Tree with Jaspess’s information to shop around for new car loan rates. (She’s getting a new one.) We got one offer, one rejection, and a bunch of “nope, you need debt counseling/consolidation instead.” :expressionless: Her credit is better than mine at 800+. Only thing I can think of is sometimes lenders get grumpy if you don’t put enough down. Guess someone’s looking for a bonus from selling more debt consolidations.

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Many credit cards on the Transunion record. 6? more? (I got the report and could count). Maybe one or two store-only ones aren’t.

Anyway, bank is saying that TransUnion can’t calculate a score, not that something about the information is unfavorable for them.

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You are not the customer. You are the merchandise.

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This is especially true in little towns with old banks, where at most there will be 3 people working in the bank at some time, you make appointments to talk to someone to get loans (and they expect you to dress up and all that), and things like reporting out transactions to credit reporting agencies might as well be asking them to launch a rocket to Mars.

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In the US, by law, when any decision is made based on public database information that is less-than-optimal, there is supposed to be a process by which you can request details to challenge potential inaccuracies. Companies generally do a lousy job in complying with that law., and when they do the required notification is frequently difficult to find…but there is supposed to be a process in place. Have you pursued it?

If the bank is of any decent size, the notice that “Trans Union couldn’t calculate a score” is odd. Generally, the standardized scores are used only for the smallest lenders or for products that are securitized and sold on the open market (and therefore need standardization). If the lender is of any size, they most likely have a proprietary scoring model that is just using data from the credit bureaus.

That being said, the feeds from the credit bureaus are not always perfect, so it’s not inconceivable that such a glitch hit when they pulled your data, and internal deduping logic (a lender will reuse data from a recent query to avoid incurring the cost of pulling another report) is interfering with pulling a non-glitched report. Annoyingly, getting someone at the lender to appreciate that nuance, even a CSR attached to the compliance process I mentioned above, may be a challenge.

(In a past life, working on insurance scoring had me with a dotted-line to a few credit scoring folks at an affiliated bank. The sausage-making on the banking side is not a pretty thing.)

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Does that make skeezy debt people human traffickers? :thinking:

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It is among the 10 largest banks in the US, per a list at bankrate.com

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Front of the notice, with our name and address and the bank’s name removed:

Screenshot 2023-11-21 at 7.32.14 PM
Screenshot 2023-11-21 at 7.32.14 PM870×502 254 KB

Back of the notice:

Screenshot 2023-11-21 at 7.32.32 PM
Screenshot 2023-11-21 at 7.32.32 PM807×456 249 KB

I’ll inquire with the bank, but since we did get credit it’s not clear what damage we may have sustained.

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Just a quick question as it may be different in the US

Being the main cardholder (you) previously, tends to mean that you are the main credit risk (so they take your income and background into consideration)

Adding an authorised user to your card (and account) does not mean that they create a new credit profile for your wife from that card. It would still be you (as if she runs a big bill you are still liable for the amount). She just becomes a linked name for the purposes of your own credit profile.

If she has never had a card taken out in her own name (I think over the past 10 years?), mortgage is paid off (so no active mortgage with her name), she would have no real credit footprint.

So the response of “we have no credit history for her” could be correct on their end.

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We primarily have accounts where we are joint owners, so the information does appear on both our credit records. I have accessed her credit history many times (with her permission of course), and there is lots of information.

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The law to cite is the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and a liberal reading of the law (which the bank might not agree with) would suggest that if you received a lower credit limit or a higher interest rate than you might have been qualified for had you had “better” credit, you are entitled to know generally how your information was deficient, so that you might challenge inaccuracies.

But, as I hinted, finding the correct contact information to obtain that guidance might not be the easiest thing to do.

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I called the bank’s credit underwriting shortly before their call center closed. The person I spoke to was baffled, because she could find no record of such letter being sent, and couldn’t understand how it could have been sent on the 15th when the card was approved on the 14th. (Until that call, I didn’t know when the card was approved.) I asked to talk to a supervisor, but all had already left for the evening. It was within 5 minutes of scheduled call center closing. I’ll call back tomorrow.

Not much idea what I want to happen, but I am certainly annoyed.

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Sounds like bullshit to me.

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Thinking about it more… back in my past life, I do remember having a discussion with TU about hosting the actual score calculation from a proprietary model on their server…so the fact that the bank is almost certainly using their own proprietary model(s) doesn’t make the “TU can’t calculate a score” BS.

The language is consistent with trying to communicate to the consumer that the credit file was too thin to score (or potentially was a no-hit).

However, from what we’ve been told…it probably shouldn’t have been a thin file.

Back in the day, I did see some weird :poop: happen when querying for credit data – the system of quickly identifying a person and pulling the data wasn’t perfect, given how quickly a system respone was needed. I assume that this is yet another example of that weird :poop:, but the bank is obfuscating what’s going on and trying to avoid the headaches of consumer relations that are required under the law.

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Absolutely. Spoke to a loan supervisor at the bank today, who insists that TransUnion gave them my score (or perhaps my wife’s, I didn’t get into which score was allegedly not available) as 000. I guess I could believe that means unavailable. He said that since TransUnion provided the information, I had to take it up with TransUnion, and gave me their number.

I called TransUnion. They agree that the bank got our credit information on Nov 6, though the person I was speaking with could not verify the data received (my impression of what he is saying is that it’s something the bank pulls, not something TransUnion sends). However, he confirmed that both of us have credit scores, and that we both would have credit scores above 0.

While I had been on the phone with the bank, I did institute a formal complaint procedure (without being sure exactly what the formal complaint will say - they’ll be contacting me. Perhaps I’m only formally complaining that I am not allowed to request a credit line increase for 6 months, even though I allege the initial limit was based on incorrect information.)

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The bank agrees they got information from TU, but they say that info included a credit score of 000.

As to insufficient info, I did pull my own TU credit history just yesterday, and it agrees I’ve been in their files since Oct 1971. (Not sure why not before that, but an earlier date and earlier history wouldn’t matter now.)

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I signed up with Credit Karma a while back out of curiosity. They give you some info for “free”, one of which is your credit scores from TransUnion and Equifax. You could sign up to see if it shows a score for you.

Why do they do this stuff for free? They want to market credit cards and other things to you.