Wonder if VISAs exposes the BIN #.
BrainTree exposes the BIN number. Built this at a hackathon last year.
http://www.reversecreditscore.com.
You can reverse engineer the BIN Number offered by BrainTree's API to calculate the species of a credit card, thus the minimum credit score.
I have a payments entrepreneur group on facebook. It has about 50 folks in it. if you want in and have built payments stuff message me.
> BrainTree's API to calculate the species of a credit
> card, thus the minimum credit score.
I have multiple credit cards. I only use one of them for online purchases. It happens to be my oldest card, the one I got when I was 18 years old. Therefore it qualifies as an "introductory" card available with little/no credit history. Would you assume anyone paying with their oldest card has a low credit score?
There are so many factors that go into a credit score that it seems asinine to base an estimate of it on the specific card used for a particular purchase.
Sure you can get the "tier" of a card and know that the issuer only grants that card to someone meeting a minimum credit score. But you know nothing else. Some people have a 750 credit score but have never applied for a second card. You don't know how the age of the credit line, its utilization, its size, its payment history...
This "reverse credit score" estimate seems like complete snake oil. If credit checks are actually an important part of your business, factor them into your costs and just pay the $50.
With the introductory card you can't eliminate a high score, and with a premium card you can't eliminate a low score, but you can assume that at some point in time they had a high score with a premium card.
An Amex may also indicate that at one point I had good credit. I could have a 600 now.
It's a creative product but I second the notion that it hardly seems credible. It might be able to drive incremental ROI but I'd have to see it to believe it.
It is a minor leak of information, which theoretically means it has value. The challenge is extracting that value.
She's only 21, has almost no credit history, and very low annual income. She does have an auto loan from her credit union for a couple thousand dollars and just very recently got her own first credit card -- a store card (Victoria's Secret) with a $500 credit limit.
In an effort to try to help "jumpstart" her credit score a little bit, though, I added her as an authorized user on one of my American Express credit cards (five-figure limit, very low utilization, and paid in full every month).
This product would very likely peg her credit score as much, much higher than what it really is (suffice it to say, she's on the lower end of the range).
For example if there's 8M cards, we're able to get sample size data like this:
Card Species 1
400-500 - 25%
500-600 - 50%
600-700 - 12%
700-800 - 13%
Credit Karma has some of this data.
Myriad higher tier cards offer many rewards that you're actually paying for anyway on marked up costs of items merchants have to charge to pay card processing fees. So I would say, yes, you deserve a low credit rating.