The world needs less discrimination based on credit score, not more. Count yourself lucky that you didn't grow up having to deal with the bullshit related to that idiotic number.

Ditto. Being responsible wth money by avoiding credit means I have a low credit score? Please. I do better with my personal finance than someone who thinks iPhones are free.

    > BrainTree's API to calculate the species of a credit
    > card, thus the minimum credit score.

Does this only work with American cards? binlist.net is showing me who the card issuer is, but doesn't seem to provide anything interesting beyond that. The small number of premium cards I have don't appear to show anything special compared to my normal ones.

That seems like a pretty fickle data source to build a product around.

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.

You can establish a floor of a cardholders historical credit score.

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.

Not really. I have several AU's on my american express card. My sister in college for one, who certainly couldn't qualify for a similar card on her own. There are a lot of AUs.

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.

I had ignored the AU case, good point. I did address the fact that it only indicates a single data point in the past that would be incorrect now.

It is a minor leak of information, which theoretically means it has value. The challenge is extracting that value.

At the opposite end of this is my girlfriend.

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 each species of cards we have a representative sample of average credit score distribution.

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.

You might find this unfair, but if you're using an introductory card for your normal purchases, you're being financially stupid.

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.

Somebody who is actively seeking to get every nickel and dime they can from credit card purchases seems more like a marginal customer to me - warranting a lower score rather than higher.

From a guy using an introductory card, I agree. If I could, I would, but apparently I can't right now.

I hope they don't. Really they shouldn't be exposing the BIN of the actual card number at all, they should be exposing a token. Your payment card number shouldn't be used to make decisions about your credit worthiness or profile you.

The BIN/IIN is pretty useful for various reasons. For example, identifying that your customer has a Mondo (https://getmondo.co.uk) card and automatically pushing rich transaction data to their statement.

I've found the binlist.net to be fairly reliable for retrieving BINs, plus their data is on GitHub if you want to grab it all. A quick Google show a bunch of similar services, although I'm not sure of their accuracy.

My emails in my profile. Sounds like a good group to join. I'm in fintech.