A New Credit Card Arrives -- With a Silicon Valley Twist (wired.com) 124
An anonymous reader shares a Wired report: When Deepak Rao founded his first startup, in 2011, he put all of his business expenses on two personal credit cards, with a combined credit limit of about $3,000. "They were totally maxed out all the time," he says. "To this date, my credit score has never recovered." Even after four years of working at Twitter with a product manager's salary, Rao still couldn't qualify for credit cards with the kinds of perks he wanted: ones that paid for vacations, or gave him points at the places he liked to shop. With his second startup, Rao is trying to solve that problem. The X1, a new credit card, is designed for people who want premium perks -- with or without premium credit scores. It uses a novel underwriting process, which links with a user's bank account to determine credit limits based on cash flow. The card promises up to five times higher credit limits than the average card.
The card itself is made of stainless steel -- the kind of objet d'art that's advertised as making a pleasant clang when you drop it -- but it's meant to be used digitally, like the Apple Card. It has a sleek app that gives users the ability to create disposable "virtual" cards, cancel subscriptions with one click, and make anonymous transactions without giving out a real name or card number. Its points are redeemable at a list of merchants frequented by the stereotypical tech bro: Peloton, Patagonia, Allbirds, and Airbnb. Perhaps for that reason, the X1 has become something of a Silicon Valley darling, with a waitlist of more than 350,000 people, the startup says. Its investors include Affirm CEO Max Levchin, Box CEO Aaron Levie, and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman. "I think of it as Silicon Valley's answer to American Express, which is really for the old guard at this point," says David Sacks, the venture capitalist and PayPal alumnus, who sits on the X1's board and uses the card himself.
The card itself is made of stainless steel -- the kind of objet d'art that's advertised as making a pleasant clang when you drop it -- but it's meant to be used digitally, like the Apple Card. It has a sleek app that gives users the ability to create disposable "virtual" cards, cancel subscriptions with one click, and make anonymous transactions without giving out a real name or card number. Its points are redeemable at a list of merchants frequented by the stereotypical tech bro: Peloton, Patagonia, Allbirds, and Airbnb. Perhaps for that reason, the X1 has become something of a Silicon Valley darling, with a waitlist of more than 350,000 people, the startup says. Its investors include Affirm CEO Max Levchin, Box CEO Aaron Levie, and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman. "I think of it as Silicon Valley's answer to American Express, which is really for the old guard at this point," says David Sacks, the venture capitalist and PayPal alumnus, who sits on the X1's board and uses the card himself.
The card promises 5 times higher credit limits (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The card promises 5 times higher credit limits (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously. I have no idea what my credit limit is because I pay off my credit card bill each month. I think for 2 months (after I bought my wife's engagement ring ) I might have accrued credit card interest, and that's over my entire life. If you're not paying off your credit card bill each month, you deserve to have a crappy credit score. This "new" card sounds like it'll be a fun mix of financial stupidity from all sides.
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If you're not paying off your credit card bill each month, you deserve to have a crappy credit score.
Credit scores are used by lenders. A high credit score is not always equivalent to fiscal responsibility. They want to be able to make money on you while also being assured they won't lose money on you.
Credit limits are important to know if you are making a large purchase. Doesn't matter if you pay it off the same month if they won't let you actually make the purchase. I got a deal for 12 months no interest on a card the same day I needed to buy a couple new appliances. Only it's a card I didn't use muc
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I noticed once in the distant past that when I did not pay off the entire bill one month that my credit limit when up shortly thereafter. Of course, it has gone up at other times as well, but the close proximity of those two events really stood out.
I got a sears card once because I purchased a refrigerator there, and X% off the price if you used their cards was a deal. I kep that card for several years but only used it twice since then and finally cancelled it last month. The tiny discount I get isn't re
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Closing credit accounts can also tank your credit score because your total available credit goes down.
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Closing credit accounts can also tank your credit score because your total available credit goes down.
And the average age of your credit accounts may go down. I just used my Target card for the first time in years because it's one of the first cards I got and they were going to close it due to inactivity in another 90 days.
Re: The card promises 5 times higher credit limits (Score:2)
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There appears to be a company called privacy.com that does that. I haven't finished looking into it but I would like to set up virtual cards for my recurring online bills (streaming services, mail-order pet supplies, what have you)
Re: The card promises 5 times higher credit limits (Score:1)
Well, i guess it depends on how you look at it. For people trying to build credit, paying it off completely every month does much less than maintaining a balance and making at least the minimum payment.
Of course maintaining a balance also means paying interrst, so theres a middle ground there somewhere.
Re: The card promises 5 times higher credit limits (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, you have to actually use your credit, but you don't have to carry a balance. In fact, carrying a balance negatively affects your score.
I get my score from my bank and a couple of CC's on their websites. The higher my overall balance that month, the lower my score at that time. It rarely swings more than a dozen points at a time, but I also rarely use more than 10% of my available revolving credit, and carrying actual debts forward hurts your score even more. The score is a measure of your ability to pay back what you borrow. The more you are borrowing, and the longer you carry the debt the less likely you are to be able to pay back the debt in full, and the more money they need to make off of you in fees before you default.
Now, that is not to be confused with your attractiveness to the cc company. Attractiveness is driven more by the amount of fees you are likely to pay. They will still give you the same upper lending limit (at first anyway), but will hit you with a higher interest rate. And once you've reached the limit they first gave you, so long as you keep making your minimum payments, they will further increase your limit so as to be able to increase your minimum payment (a large portion of which is pure profit for them). If/when you default, they have likely already made more off of you in fees than the principle on the purchases. Combine that with whatever they will get from 3rd party collectors for your debt, and the tax write off they get for selling your debt for a "loss", and they've more than made their money back.
I pay everything off every month (except one card used for large electronics purchases, which comes with 0% APR for the first year). I'm not attractive (few unsolicited offers), but I have a stellar credit score (800+/- 10 points). Means when I want credit I can get it, and at good rates, but they are not going to be beating down my door to offer me a CC. Loans, on the other hand, I get offered constantly.
Re: The card promises 5 times higher credit limits (Score:5, Informative)
Not quite.
I was in charge of technical delivery for credit scoring systems for one of the big 3 for 6 years that was used by a number of major lenders across the globe, as well as many not so major ones.
The first and most important point is that there's no such thing as a single unified credit score. Credit lending decision engines are configured to provide bespoke lending decisions on a per lender basis, and lenders will even have different criteria internally for different products. This means any "credit score" is largely meaningless; you can have a perfect score and still get rejected if you don't meet the actual lending criteria.
Essentially these systems calculate hundreds of metrics based on your borrowing history, from how many months you've been in default (hopefully none!) through to your debt to lending ratio, i.e. how much debt you actually have compared to how much debt you're authorised to have - if you've got $2,500 on your credit card out of a limit of $10,000 then that ratio is 0.25, and of course metrics relating to income, employment, age, and so forth (obviously you don't want to loan thousands to someone who is 80 on a bare minimum pension) - as I say, these metrics number in the thousands. Some of the data points held from which these metrics are calculated are just flat out weird, I've no idea why, but Experian credit data contains your star sign for example as if that has any relevance whatsoever to your credit trustworthiness, but hey-ho.
Once you have those metrics, how they're then used to determine credit worthiness really depends on the lender and their products. Some will have a higher risk appetite than others. Some will have low risk products for people with poor credit history that people are directed to on a simple initial "have you defaulted in the last 5 years" type decision, and then have a completely different set of lending calculations for standard products for people with a typical credit history for example. The way it historically works is to simply assign points to the various metrics depending on the weighting of importance to the company or product in question, to produce what you call the score, this is then typically checked against a lookup table to see what product/interest rate/borrowing amount you can have. More recently, with machine learning, this is obviously automated with models trained on past credit lending data instead of manually defined flows.
But fundamentally the point is the same; whether it's a different calculation per lender, or per product, and the sheer number of metrics, the way the credit score is determined is never consistent so the idea of "your credit score" is a bit of a pointless concept.
In terms of specifics, in my experience most lenders I saw actually DO like you to carry a balance contrary to what you claim, but they want that balance to be manageable; if you're utilising 25% of your balance every month then it means they're getting a consistent flow of interest payments, but you're not pushing the limits in such a way that you're at risk of defaulting even in the event of unforeseen events.
It's also important to note that the calculations change over time, I was in this industry after the financial crash and I saw this result in a major rethink of models; a perceived good borrower in 2011 looked completely different from a good borrower in 2007 for example, financial institutions had become much more risk averse. So going by the above example, whereas 50% - 75% might have looked like a healthy balance to maintain in 2007, that had dropped to 25% - 50% by 2013 at many institutions for example. There are many other criteria that can effect decisions, some lenders are shit at updating credit bureaus - MBNA for example recently was taking as much as 4 months to update customer data to the bureaus, so this meant you could have a $10,000 limit maxed out, pay $2,500 a month to clear it in 4 months, only to be rejected for new lending because the credit bureau was still reporting the last known dat
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if you've got a great credit history and a high income they may reject you for cards aimed at risky lenders because they won't make any profit from you ...
As a wealthy and financially astute customer, you would be an idiot to borrow money on a card aimed at risky borrowers, because of the eye-watering interest rates such cards charge.
Though personal borrowing and government borrowing are not strictly equivalent, it is interesting to note that nations can borrow at close to zero interest rates. Presumably, most nations are considered to be the most reliable entities to lend to. Money in government bonds is safe, but certainly not very exciting in earning poten
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Yes, CC companies exist to make money, and as such are not as interested in perfectly safe bets as they are in moderately safe bets. Perfectly safe means your ability
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Re: The card promises 5 times higher credit limit (Score:2)
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After all, your credit limit is a function of what you can afford to pay back on a monthly basis. Higher income generally equals higher credit limit (all other things being equal). Therefore, a high credit utilization rate (something approaching 50% or more) would require you to charge more in a month than you could reasonably pay-back in that same time period requiring you to carry that balance forward (even if only briefly), and thus
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... you have to actually use your credit, but you don't have to carry a balance.
I am not sure what my credit score is, because I don't want to borrow money, having been burnt by debts some years ago. What the banks want is for customers to borrow money, and show ability to pay it back on time. My bank offers me good terms on various types of borrowing, I presume based on the savings I have. But now I have savings, I don't need to borrow money.
What would concern me about a new type of lending is that it could fall into the same trap as sub-prime mortgages: lending money to people who h
Re: The card promises 5 times higher credit limit (Score:2)
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Re: The card promises 5 times higher credit limit (Score:2)
Re: The card promises 5 times higher credit limit (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure the available credit ratio is what matters, as long as you use it from time to time.
Quick thought experiment, if your credit limit is a cookie jar full of money you leave on the counter for your kids to borrow from, how would you rate their credit worthiness if they
A. Put in what they take before the end of the month.
B. Maintain a balance... as in perpetually owe the cookie jar month over month. As in they owe you money. Forever. It doesn't really matter if they put new money in to repl
Re: The card promises 5 times higher credit limits (Score:2)
My mom literally had just completed a bankruptcy, I cosigned for her to get a credit card, and insisted that she pay it off this way so she won't have to pay interest, basically doing exactly what you're describing. Some 3-4 years after this, her credit score was in the 700s even though she only had a 35k/year income.
Really I don't believe this guy couldn't qualify for better credit cards unless he was still holding on to bad habits.
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Mom had stellar credit before this and within 3 years had several credit cards with low APR and moderate limits. 7 years latter Dad still couldn't get the bank to turn on the credit option on is Chase issued ATM card. By that same poi
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Times change also. I remember when I was in college, getting a credit card approved was a major deal because you had to show you were able to pay off the bills, were financially solvent, etc. Then only a few short years later the whole "pre-approved" credit cards starting arriving in the mail for lots of people I knew.
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I am a bankruptcy attorney.
A few years ago, I checked credit scores of some clients afterwards.
A year later, those who paid everything on time were generally in the high 600s. In one outlying case, the client came back with a printout showing a little over 700 eleven months later, asking, "can this be right?"
A significant portion of your score comes from the length of time since the last "bad thing." So while bankruptcy is about the hardest hit you can take, it *stops* the monthly dings on every past due
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Reminds me of the car insurance companies who send out ads saying they might be able to save you $700 on your car insurance.
WTH??!! My insurance isn't in the same country as that amount. What kind of insurance rates are these people paying?
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What can possibly go wrong ?
They are targeting an tricky market segment.
For every responsible person who simply happens to have a bad credit score, they are going to find a 100 people who just have a bad credit score.
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His market segment is people who have plenty of cash, but can't really explain the source of the funds. What type of people might that be?
Try budgeting (Score:3)
If your cards are always maxed out, you have no idea how budgeting works. No one in their right mind would issue more credit.
Pay your balance down. It's much easies than starting a questionable loan business.
Re: Try budgeting (Score:3)
Re: Try budgeting (Score:2)
That...or he's just a scammer preying in fresh-out-of-school techies with a sob story atuned to the silly valley environment he wants to target.
This isn't any different from the guy asking you for a 20 to pay a parking bill or fill a gas can or fix a tire at 11pm on a Friday night.
Re: Try budgeting (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Try budgeting (Score:2)
He's trying to make money, not help anyone for one thing.
I mean you know who else knows your cash flow and will issue you credit cards? Your damn bank or credit union.
Then the points/rewards thing, that's a silly game, I'm not saying anyone is entitled to points/cash back etc., I know damn well how transaction fees and credit card rewards work, but most people are far better off with cash back than ... "points"
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He only had $3k in credit card debt and in 4 years with a good salary couldn't figure out how to get his score back up? Either he's full of shit, is misrepresenting what he did to trash his credit, or doesn't have a fucking clue about how financing and credit scores work.
Furthermore, how does one even fund a startup with only $3k of credit on credit cards? And how borked is your credit if you can only get that amount? My freaking Sears card (when I had one) had a higher limit.
So now a guy who couldn't qualify for a line of credit to fund a startup is behind a startup offering higher lines of credit to people that can't qualify for higher lines of credit? Sounds *super* sketchy. Are there kneecaps being broken by their repayment department?
It uses a novel underwriting process, which links with a user's bank account to determine credit limits based on cash flow.
Also, the whole point of a cre
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The word you are looking for is "Marketing".
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I finally have a real credit line after many years of being unable to get any credit but secured loans from local banks. The only thing that changed was getting a secured credit card and paying on it for a few years.
All the typical advice about improving your credit is the Right Thing to Do, but people who are caught in statistical black holes and can't get proper lines of credit--whether they are like me and started from zero or like the subject of the article who had some rough times but are long past it
Re: Try budgeting (Score:2)
They have an alternative: secured credit lines.
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Or don't buy on credit. Then your credit rating doesn't matter.
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Re: Try budgeting (Score:2)
As someone who eschewed credit long ago, I can tell you all those things are easy to get without credit with the exception of car rentals.
I literally offered Hertz a $25k deposit to rent a minivan for a couple days. This was enough to buy the vehicle. They still wouldn't do it.
For everything else, your income and cash can get you in.
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Re: Try budgeting (Score:2)
Sure. But for most people, credit is a big part of the reason they don't have money.
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You're right - its a trade-off. But on the other hand, I've never had a problem getting insurance, car rentals or house rentals. Maybe I've been lucky. When I moved 6 years ago I payed 6 months up front on my house rental because I knew my credit rating wasn't good, They ran a credit check anyway and I passed so it actually wouldn't have mattered.
I'd put up with a lot to not be beholden to the credit rating agencies, but it turns out that it only really matters if you intend to live on credit in the first p
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I'd put up with a lot to not be beholden to the credit rating agencies, but it turns out that it only really matters if you intend to live on credit in the first place.
It only doesn't matter if you have enough money. For many people, coming up with a regular sized deposit is already hard enough.
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Fair point. Maybe I was lucky. Like I said, I paid 6 months up front, but it turned out I would have passed the checks anyway. With a pretty low score. It maybe helps if you don't actually have black marks for rent or mortgage arrears. The number is only one small part of it.
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Maybe we could use another alternative to the broken system rather than just feeding it more.
I'm a success story. (Score:2)
"The only thing that changed was getting a secured credit card and paying on it for a few years."
Yep. I came out of a "consumer proposal" with a credit score of about 540. That's what I did - secured credit card for a year, then a low limit card.
Fast forward 15 years. No missed payments, haven't carried a balance long enough to pay interest in at least 5 years. Score? Equifax, 854.
It can be done. But it won't happen at the pace of instant gratification.
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If you put a significant portion of your expenses on your card, you can max or nearly max the card and still pay it off every month. Between in-store skimmers and online hacks, I rarely let anyone see my debit card number. Fraud is much easier to resolve on a credit card where you're not out the money until you lose a dispute. With debit, the money is gone immediately.
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Re: Try budgeting (Score:2)
And that churn is the best way to improve your credit. That's how it's always worked, to my knowledge. I don't get why millennials can't figure out that sometimes asking your parents how the world works is a good idea.
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I don't get why millennials can't figure out that sometimes asking your parents how the world works is a good idea.
Because the problem didn't start with them. The heavy growth of credit card debt started with Baby Boomers and early Gen, with credit card debt rising heavily in the 90's. That, and age doesn't always bring wisdom. I've gotten a lot better over the last decade. However, if I had a kid, I would definitely want him to find a better example than me.
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I don't get why millennials can't figure out that sometimes asking your parents how the world works is a good idea.
Perhaps if you asked your parents you'd get the answer: every generation's set of newly-minted adults has trouble asking their parents for advice about how the world works. Ask your parents about the mistakes they made when they were fresh out of school, or recollect the mistakes that you made. I have a great relationship with my folks and am fortunate enough to still be able to lean on them for advice, yet I still make plenty of mistakes. Millennials may refer to it as "adulting", but otherwise it's just m
Re: Try budgeting (Score:2)
This has nothing to do with financial literacy on the part of millennials. I'm just saying everyone over a certain age knows how this shit works. You use your card and pay off your balance and your credit worthiness climbs. Obviously, millennials aren't getting the message from their Google searches.
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Obviously, millennials aren't getting the message from their Google searches.
I beg to differ. You’re trying to paint Millennials with a brush that’s wide enough to cover all generations.
I’ve never carried a credit card balance in my life; we have never once failed to pay it off in full each month. We budget this month’s income towards next month, we have a six-month emergency fund, we never spend more than I make, I put myself through grad school and most of my undergraduate without taking out student loans, all of our vehicles were purchased with cash, and m
Re: Try budgeting (Score:2)
Actually, it IS largely specific to millennials due to the years they were coming into adulthood being affected by the 2008 financial collapse. Gen X came up before easy access to credit was stifled by regulations. Boomers saw the introduction of credit and received multiple lessons from the media on how this works. Millennials were just assumed to have absorbed the information, but did not.
Re:Try budgeting (Score:5, Interesting)
It looks like the subject of the article had his credit cards maxed out all the time yet didn't have an issue knowing how to budget. They were using the money for startup expenses. Considering that they were apparently successful, it seems to have been a workable strategy. The idea that their credit is still bad from having a maxed balance years later seems unlikely though. Credit scores are annoying, but they don't recover that slowly. Either they're exaggerating about still having bad credit, or they're leaving out a detail like having simply defaulted on the credit card debt.
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High revolving balance is definitely something that affects your credit score. Paying late also. Neither of those will suppress your credit score for years after. Best conclusion is that he's fibbing about something.
As for the expense of credit card debt, there's no doubt that it's high. You have to consider opportunity cost though. They're easy credit which, for people without significant assets, may be the only form of credit they can get. They most definitely are traps and exploitive, but there are situa
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"There’s no credit score because, except when buying a house, there’s no credit."
Wow. I didn't know all Europeans who buy cars, boats, RVs, planes, or other high ticket items pay cash for them every time.
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Re: Try budgeting (Score:2)
That's not fair, you can have a budget and a revolving line of credit, and minus a safety margin for the unexpected, use your credit. It's a service you're paying for, you can account for the interest charges in your budget, and there's nothing wrong with that _if_ you're ok with the expense. You might have to be to get a small business off the ground, or expand. Ideally, you want to get to a point you don't owe interest perpetually, but to get there you might need to spend other people's money. Do you
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"The card itself is made of stainless steel" (Score:3)
"but it's meant to be used digitally"
Presumably that means you'll never receive instructions to "destroy your old card." That could be rough on the old shredder.
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Points? Vacations? (Score:2)
No wonder America is so credit card dependent.
Use a debit card. (Score:1, Insightful)
This is stupid. At one time I had poor credit due to not having a credit history. I got a secured credit card from Discover with a $2,500 credit limit and 1% cash back. I spent roughly $25-100/month on the card and put everything else on my debit card. After 8 months my credit score was high enough to apply for other credit cards with higher credit limits and "perks."
TLDR, no one is forcing you to charge everything to your credit card -- you can get a debit card for free from your bank. If you want to
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I spent roughly $25-100/month on the card and put everything else on my debit card.
At that point, you probably should have simply used just the credit card for most things and paid it off every month. If you have a CC with sufficient limit for your expenses, can manage your finances responsibly, and pay it off every month, you don't need a debit card -- and shouldn't have/use one anyway, they offer fewer benefits and protections than a CC. Just saying it's a strategy worth considering -- I'm debt-free with a high-limit CC, which I pay off every month, and no debit card and my credit sc
Silly rabbit, credit is for car loans! (Score:5, Insightful)
These rich startup shysters really live in their own little world. The reason average people need good credit isn't so they can "sign up for a credit card with lots of rewards and perks", it's so you don't get ass fucked on the interest when you buy a new vehicle.
If you have a decent amount of money in your bank account, you can just put your everyday purchases on a debit card. Yeah, you'll miss out on airline points and what not, but in terms of loss, that's nowhere near as bad as having to pay thousands more on a car loan because the best you could get was an 11% interest rate.
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You obviously haven't bought a car in the last 20 years. If you pay more than 3% APR on your car loan you're getting royally shafted. I have never seen a car loan for more than half the best credit card rates
Being debt-free (Score:2)
is the best perk of all.
If you need a high credit limit for non-essential purchases, you are living beyond your means. In fact, I bet a big chunk of your pay check just goes to pay interest on your existing debts. That's no way to live.
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True for us peasants, but when you're working with massive amounts of money, credit card perks can have proportionately massive value - my dad's boss flies around the world on a whim practically for free on credit card perks alone because he runs all his expenses through them, for example.
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Ugh, that should probably read: "my dad's boss flies _tax-free_ around the world on a whim practically for free on credit card perks alone." Credit card perks, cashback, miles, etc. are generally not taxable because they're viewed as rebates, but these are obviously reimbursed expenses. So, he pays say $10,000 and gets $10,000 back from the company to pay off the card before any interest is due and also gets a free flight out of the deal. Technically a rebate, but the company doesn't ask for them to pay for
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You are 100% correct, but it doesn't mean not to get credit cards. I believe the only debt someone should have is their house. With a few exceptions (obviously), anyone who has any other debts besides house is living beyond their means. And that goes for car payments too. If you can't buy your car in cash, drive the cheapest reliable car you can get. That said, in some conditions, it IS ok to get a loan for a car, but ONLY if you have the cash/assets to pay it off fully with no trouble (ie, 401k/retirement
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You can still get the benefits of reward cards while being debt free. I use my CC for all purchases, then pay it off immediately. I've gotten several thousands of dollars from the CC company over the years, they haven't gotten a dime from me ( interest or fees ).
Can help with your credit score too.
Of course, the old adage applies; if you aren't paying for a service, you're the product. I'm sure they sell my purchase history, but they're welcome to it.
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Oh, I know how transaction fees work for businesses. The point is that *I* haven't given my CC company a single cent in all the years I've had the card, whereas they've given me quite a bit in cash back rewards.
I kinda sorta feel bad for businesses that have to pay the transaction fees ( more so with the small businesses than the larger ones ), but that's the cost of doing business.
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wut? (Score:4, Interesting)
So, the guy who brags that he can't manage his personal finances wants to start a finance company? I'm out.
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That proud cluelessness is "the silicon valley twist".
Red flags galore (Score:2)
The marketing has "stay away" written all over it. But I guess I'm not in the target demographic anyway. Not a "tech bro".
Physical cards (Score:2)
It's nice, that stainless steel card. But who uses physical cards anymore? I just use my phone and tap to pay. If it's stolen it can't be accessed (at least not easily.) You would also realize much faster when your phone is stolen and can zero it. .. how come there is still no way to view itemized receipts online with the credit card balance? At least
Speaking of tap to pay, why don't they transmit the itemized receipt into the phone when I tap to pay? Also, with all the credit card innovation over 70 years
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Except when you go through the metal detector at the airport (not joking, happened to me).
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The tap to pay on my Visa actually never works anymore, which is weird. The old style of card that they used to issue worked much better. So I use my Apple Watch now. It's absurdly ostentatious, but it works so much faster and better, I've gotten over it. I just want to be able to pay.
Bank account access? (Score:4, Insightful)
They want to access to my bank account directly?
Fucking nope.
Pointless for "regular" business. (Score:1)
This doesn't solve any of the problems small shops have. The biggest of which is the transaction fee. Disrupt the industry by dropping the transaction fee to 1% and/or allow the transaction fee to be pushed to the buyer's side. Otherwise, unless I'm a high end boutique business I have little incentive to accept the card if it takes even an hour of "paperwork" to be able to accept it.
I want some features in the credit card ... (Score:3)
I want to create virtual cards, give it to merchants and invalidate it at will. Citi card gives me virtual card in such a clunky and useless form. I can use a desktop app or a web pop up window to create a virtual card. Not a big deal, I can do that. But, these cards can't last more than 12 months, each card is tied to one merchant, and subscriptions paid using this card auto renew! The whole idea of virtual card is to stop this auto renewal from rogue merchants. Its so painful I stopped using it.
I really would like to get a card where I can create virtual numbers, keep them alive as long as I want to. I am even willing to pay a resonable fee for having 10 or 15 of these virtual cards. Of course, this is an industry that charges 40 $ late fee for a 1 $ underpayment or 1 day delayed payment. Their idea of reasonable fee is likely to be 20$ per year per virtual number.
I wish I can create virtual cards with dollar limits that I can use and maintain control over payments from my side. I do not want to depend on the rougue merchant's web site, login, cancel mechanism. They don't have an incentive to make that part easy or bug free.
I think I should simply use anonymous gift cards with prefunded amounts. Again these guys too have issues keeping the card alive for long durations.
Re: (Score:2)
I dont need to give my bank account to Peter to hide my name from Paul.
I want to create virtual cards, give it to merchants and invalidate it at will. Citi card gives me virtual card in such a clunky and useless form. I can use a desktop app or a web pop up window to create a virtual card. Not a big deal, I can do that. But, these cards can't last more than 12 months, each card is tied to one merchant, and subscriptions paid using this card auto renew! The whole idea of virtual card is to stop this auto renewal from rogue merchants. Its so painful I stopped using it.
I really would like to get a card where I can create virtual numbers, keep them alive as long as I want to. I am even willing to pay a resonable fee for having 10 or 15 of these virtual cards. Of course, this is an industry that charges 40 $ late fee for a 1 $ underpayment or 1 day delayed payment. Their idea of reasonable fee is likely to be 20$ per year per virtual number.
I wish I can create virtual cards with dollar limits that I can use and maintain control over payments from my side. I do not want to depend on the rougue merchant's web site, login, cancel mechanism. They don't have an incentive to make that part easy or bug free.
I think I should simply use anonymous gift cards with prefunded amounts. Again these guys too have issues keeping the card alive for long durations.
Basically you want to be able to issue one time codes.
Several banks in the UK already do this. The problem is, you can't really create one time credit card numbers because of the way credit card numbers work. There's only about 5-9 unique digits per bank. The first digit is the issuer (Visa/MC/AMEX), the next 5 identify the bank, the next 9 are the unique identifier, the final digit is a checksum (for a standard Visa/MC 16 digit number the unique identifier can vary, AMEX uses 8, so the number is 15 digi
Maybe, for some people (Score:2)
If you manage to put your finances in order it is very easy to get 700+ scores and premium credit cards. But it takes time, maybe about 5-10 years.
So, they aim to shorten this by looking at your cashflows. You have just graduated, had no income and hence no credit prior, and now working at Apple making $200,000/year. And let us give you a premium credit card with $100k limit. No need to wait several years to build credit (and learn how to use it).
What could go wrong?
I am not interested in that credit card (Score:2)
...I'll have what he's having
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Chip & PIN? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Like always, overgeneralizing is dumb.
A zero-fee card with cashback is the optimal choice for some. For others (especially those who travel a lot with a specific airline or hotel chain), the value of the perks minus the fee may be worth more than you'd get with cashback. Assess your own personal situation and make an informed decision.