Comment by Despegar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Despegar | Hacker News Reader

The crux of this issue is that Apple Card is only for individuals

>“As with any other individual credit card, your application is evaluated independently,” Williams said in a statement. “We look at an individual’s income and an individual’s creditworthiness, which includes factors like personal credit scores, how much personal debt you have, and how that debt has been managed.”

That setup makes it “possible for two family members to receive significantly different credit decisions,” Williams said. He added that the bank is actively exploring ways to allow users to share their Apple Card with family members.

Goldman was aware of the potential issue before it rolled out the Apple Card in August, but it opted to go with individual accounts because of the added complexity of dealing with co-signers or other forms of shared accounts, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/11/goldman-wants-to-fix-the-app...

She mentions she has better and longer credit history than David, and since they share all financial accounts, she likely reported her income as their joint income. I sincerely doubt they'd be raising this much fuss if she'd put $0 in the income box and was surprised.

Her point is that all those factors showed her as more credit worthy with the exception of 'Homemaker' and 'Female'.

But David has a higher social media profile than his wife. Does it make you wonder if that's now being considered in "the algorithm"?

No, since unsupported conspiracy theories don't tend to convince me.

I don’t equate hypothesizing the contents of a black box algorithm as conspiracy theory mongery. We’re looking at all possible inputs.

To add some anecdata, my relative in the financial software business has been telling me for years that they’ve been looking at mining public social media data to enhance risk management. I wouldn’t put it past Goldman (and their recent push into public banking) to consider this.

And the Chinese have just come right out and done it.

Occam's Razor says otherwise.

If Goldman is doing this, they would have been caught by now with real data, not some entitled asshole whining about how his wife isn't getting the same exact credit limit as he is. Someone would be citing apples-to-apples comparisons by now. Yet nobody has. Hmm. Gee. I wonder why?

>she likely reported her income as their joint income

That's not in her post. Did DHH mention this?

No, ctrl-f income on his tweets only finds it in the replies, https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1192541235959017475

That's not exactly the way credit works. For one, you're supposed to report your income not joint income when filling out applications. You can however list joint assets, or at least that's much fuzzier.

EDIT: Apparently, you can use household income. However, if two parties are applying for a credit card and trying to secure both lines with the same assets, you should expect one to be lower (if not outright declined).

In this case, there's a FICO score to consider, but there's also other components. For instance, you can be declined from receiving a credit card if you are a "churner", you can also be declined for not making the bank enough money (aka you never miss payments and the card has no fees).

Finally and importantly, the bank has the right to set what ever bar it wants for your credit limit. If they feel giving you a high limit will make them money, they do it, if they don't, they wont ("they" here being encoded in an algorithm). They can even legally assign credit at random, provided they have controls to ensure the bank doesn't go bankrupt.

In this case, the only thing the bank has to prove is that they didn't use signals illegally (usually this includes adding protected class information, e.g. gender, among others). Many banks don't even keep a record of that information and definitely not as part of the algorithm. I suspect Goldman wouldn't be that stupid.

Meaning - what ever the reason for the discrepancy, gender was very very likely not the culprit here.

> your income

This is no longer true.

==

Before 2013, the CARD Act required that card issuers take into account only the individual card applicant’s income or assets. However, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau put in an amendment in 2013 that allowed card issuers to also consider any third-party income and assets that an individual card applicant of at least 21 years of age has a “reasonable expectation of access to.”

That's fair, some places are explicit and still lay out "individual", but legally you don't have to.

In either case, I'd also note here, because they are a married couple they are counting that income twice. Which, for offering credit is a bit dangerous as this income "secures" the credit line. I'm more surprised it didn't result in an outright decline if they didn't seperate their income when applying.

> For one, you're supposed to report your income not joint income when filling out applications.

Not necessarily, American Express promotes using household income on their card applications.

Edit: From an American Express application: "Include all income available to you. If under age 21, include only your own income. Income includes wages, retirement income, investments, rental properties, etc."

> she likely reported her income as their joint income

It seems incredibly unlikely that she reported a substantial joint income and received a $57 credit limit. Doesn't it seem far more likely that he reported their joint income and she reported $0 income?!

I have no idea how this works, but wouldn't they look at past income history to handle the possibility of divorce and being able to repay the debt? Or is that illegal?

This would make sense to me, as DHH probably has an insanely high individual income history.

From what I understand of the original post, they filed taxes jointly and his wife had a higher credit score (though there isn't information about the credit history details, just on the overall score). This would suggest she should have received about the same credit amount, or more. To be fair, it isn't clear if she had more personal debt, which based on the official response, might have caused the difference in credit limits.

In TFA, she says explicitly: “I do not have any debts.”

Having no debts is actually tanking my credit score by a ton.

Seriously. My credit score took a hit after I paid off my car and my credit cards. The justification I was given is that they penalize you if you don’t have some kind of ongoing debt you’re servicing.

Our system is ten kinds of messed up.

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