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Credit Reporting Agencies/Traps in the Fine Print Why it's important to understand your credit score and how it is compiled and also to read your credit card agreement -- hard as it may be to decipher.
According to McKingley, the key to understanding how credit cards are marketed lies in the great digital revolution, the amassing of data on American consumers.
Well, this gold mine of information residing out there on these databases by the consumer reporting agencies, the credit bureaus, they are collecting information about what kind of accounts you have opened, the balances, whether or not you make those payments on time and that is a huge reservoir of information there they can tap into and be able to get a sense of whether or not a consumer is a revolver, someone who doesn’t pay the balance often for each month, so they can kinda sift those out and in today it really becomes almost surgical.
The ability to surgically target consumers and track their financial behavior has become a booming business dominated by three credit reporting agencies which gather information. All that data is then crunched by a little known company called FairIsaac which calculates a number called a FICO score for almost every American with a credit history.
We are not a credit reporting agency like an Equifax changing the experiences you know that’s gathering information daily on consumers and building up consumer records.
Tom Queen is a spokesman for FairIssac. We simply work with the credit reporting agencies and they deploy their data onto our mathematical formula to create that score.
The medium FICO score is 720 out of a possible 850. The riskiest customer has scores below 600.The scores is an indication of how likely you are to pay your bills.
Lenders use that score almost like a thermometer to determine if they are going to grant credit or not, so the algorism is an indication of that consumer’s future risk in terms of credit behavior. Algorism means a mathematical formula. Yes, the mathematical formula. How many people have this number?
We estimate that approximately 75% of the US population that is eligible for credits is these who are eighteen years older have a FICO score at any given time. You know your credit score? You are not aware that you have a credit score? I am aware I have one, but I don’t know what it is. Right, I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what it is either.
So when I said to you the words FICO score, do you know what FICO score is? I know the term; I am not clear what they are whenever I got my credit card. An individual’s FICO score often determines how much interest he will pay on a credit card.
The terms and conditions of the cards are laid out in the fine print of this contract. When I get a credit card, there is a contract that goes along with it. What kind of contract is this, cause I never read it, have you ever read it? Whether or can't you?
Er, I'd have to admit that in most cases I may just glanced at it. You know, it’s filled with so many legal terms so many pages in such a small print and it can be intimidating I think.
It’s says that I’ve guaranteed the terms alone for as long as I have the card.
Yeah, well, the other things the one unique thing about the credit card business is that the issuer can change the terms and conditions at will. Without asking my permission? Absolutely, they can change it all; it only takes 15 days notice to make those changes. It means you could be offered five or six percent interest rate today, perhaps get it, two months later, that could be 30 percent there is nothing to prevent the issuer from changing those conditions.
Even professor Elizabeth Wallren, an expert on contract law says she has a hard time deciphering her contract. I’ve read my credit card agreement and I can’t figure out the terms. I teach contract law, and the underlying premise of the contract law is the two parties of the contract understand what the terms are.
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