Estimated credit limit

dlevene

Just a slight moan...

Looking at a 0% purchase card for a large one-off purchase. Looking at what's out there, and what's really striking is how some banks can't wrap their head around the idea that without knowing the likely credit limit, it's a waste of everyone's time.

Some - including MBNA, Lloyds... - indicated the estimated limit when I used their eligibility checker. Great! But I went several rounds with Barclaycard, who couldn't/wouldn't tell me, and struggled to comprehend that if I applied without knowing and the limit was too low, not only was it totally useless for what I needed, but I'd take a hit on my credit rating for my trouble.

Clearly banks have the capability, so weird that they're refusing to be transparent over this information with their customers?

DullGreyGuy

dlevene said:

Clearly banks have the capability, so weird that they're refusing to be transparent over this information with their customers?

Just because company A can do it doesnt mean that company B has developed their software in the same way to have the same capability. Being theoretically possible is not the same as being practicably possible. 

In most companies there is an annual IT change budget of £Xm, product owners/business areas then effectively bid to get a slide of that fund to develop their project. Regulatory change always get what they need once its been confirmed they arent sneaking in anything else under the radar of regulatory change and then the rest is divided up generally based on the return on investment.

The guy that owns X Banks credit card application process may fully agree with you that its a great idea to give an indication of limit but IT have told him its a £Ym project and he's not comfortable that he'll get the 2% increase in customers taking up the cards he needs to get a better RTI from the current account guy that wants £Ym to reduce the banks losses from fraud by 1%

Don't under estimate the costs involve in making changes to financial service's systems... many are fairly archaic, overly complex and very few in the organisation (if any) really understand how they all hang together so vast numbers of expensive resources need to be involved to ensuring doing something over here doesnt break anything over there. 

As an example, a former client wanted to offer buy 12 months insurance and get 3 months free resulting in a 15 month policy (you'll note most offers are of the likes of pay for 9 get 3 free and so remains a 12 month policy). IT spent a month looking at the request and came back stating they'd found over 400 places where the policy length was hard coded or assumed, a £20m estimate to make the change and a 1% confidence factor that they'd found all the places... we ran a 9+3 promo

dlevene

Haha, fair enough.

I just think it's such a fundamental feature for what must be a pretty substantial market (large one-off purchases, balance transfers...)

Lomcevak

I only know the internals of one provider well, but that assigned a credit limit when it did a credit check and income assessment during application. Until that point, it couldn't tell you.