I believe everyone must have received some letters from your mailbox, like “You’re pre-selected to XXX card”, and some of you may be recommended to figure out whether you have received an pre-qualified offer on one bank’s website before applying for a card. Most of us are likely to think that application for a card can be guaranteed with one pre-approved card. Is it so easy? Today we will tell you what’s a Pre-approved offer is in great details.
First, Pre-approved offer can be divided into two kinds as follows:
- You receive a letter proactively sent by a credit card company;
- You search a pre-approved offer on a bank’s website by your own.
Although credit card banks may send you letters, it is still a huge expense to send letters to a large group of customers. Thus, every bank actually establishes a special website for customers to search relevant pre-approved offers by themselves.
Secondly, what’s the standard for a bank to select pre-approved customers? In fact, the answer is very easy and lies in the cooperation between the bank and Credit Bureau. For example, the bank can obtain its wanted list of customers through a purchase method from the Credit Bureau, while the Credit Bureau certainly should establish special conditions, such as the amount of credit score, or late statement. As the Credit Bureau has no right to disclose all your personal information, the list that the bank obtain only includes some rough information about you. Apart from the Credit Bureau, the bank can also select its wanted list according to your membership. For example, whether you take flights of a certain airline, or whether you are a frequent traveler of a certain hotel, etc.
The Credit Bureau should not “sell” your detailed information to banks, which means that banks cannot approve your application for credit cards on the basis of such rough information. Actually banks purchase those information only in order to select customer groups. Banks hope to select customers who are willing to apply for credit cards issued by them, and, at the same time, those customers can also undertake the responsibility of repayment. Whether your application for a credit card can be approved decides on your hard pull as well as your latest detained personal information obtained by banks from the Credit Bureau.
Therefore, two common problems can be clarified here:
- Is there HP that you can apply for if you have a pre-approved offer? Basically yes. you can figure out this problem through details in a letter or a bank’s website. As clicking the button of Apply, you also allow a bank to pull your credit record from the Credit Bureau. Very few people say they obtain some certain cards only with SP approved. This is not a current rule and you should not embrace too much hope on it. However, the search of pre-approved offer has no influence on your credit scores.
- Can your application for credit cards be approved if you have a pre-approved offer? The answer is uncertain. Personally speaking, a pre-approved offer shows that your objective conditions have met the regulations established by a bank, yet the bank only gets some rough information about you. What the bank needs is more detailed examination. If some details on your credit record fail to meet the bank’s standards, or relatively negative elements occur on your credit report during the period when the bank sends you a letter and you make your application for a credit card, the bank will still refuse your application as well.
In a word, you should not be more optimistic about a pre-approved offer under most occasions. I mean you can also consider your pre-approved offer as a piece of advertisement which, in fact, instigates you to apply for credit cards of these banks. For example, some kind of a pre-approved offer labeled a certain credit limit must be issued by banks with worse reputation. I advise you to never apply for those credit cards.
Actually, a pre-qualified offer has some other advantages, other than its disadvantages mentioned above. Take two typical examples as follows:
- Citi Bank: if you can search Citi’s pre-qualified offer, you can avoid 8/65 rule as you apply for a credit card through the pre-qualified offer page. Here is the data point;
- Amex: Amex send pre-qualified offers only to customers who have no credit cards of Amex, or let you search its pre-qualified offers by yourself. If you can search relevant information, you will receive a sign-up bonus which is better than a public offer.You can obtain more detailed information through this post How To Get the Best AmEx Sign-Up Bonuses.
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