@coldfusion wrote:
@FinStar wrote:
Just to clarify OP, the offers that may pop up as a PNC customer are not pre-approved, not in the sense like Regions, Capital One or Chase, for instance.
Depending on your banking relationship, you'd likely see 'pre-selected' offers, which are not the same. Potentially, if your profile is fairly solid and can support it, then you can still be approved whether there are offers or not.
I'm interested in hearing your take as to what criteria to apply in order to identify these 'pre-selected' offers as not emperically being preapprovals. Every one I have received from them has been identified as a 'pre-selected' offer but which includes both a fixed APR and opt-out language. Opt-out language in part outlines that the offer of credit is based upon information in your credit report.
I'm also not aware of any legal or universally-agreed-upon definition within the financial services industry as to what constitutes a preapproval, a prequalfication, or a preselection. "If it walks like a duck..."
To add a data point to the confusion, I have a single mailer from Eastern Bank that tells me on the same page that I have been preselected for a personal loan, prequalified for a rate as low as 6.99% APR, with opt-out language telling me that I can choose to stop receiving prescreened offers of credit.
Thoughts?
Making my rounds and just saw this. So, let's just say that in a 'prior life' I was a bit more intimately familiar with some internal processes, based on profitability models, cross-selling opportunities, etc.; but in a nutshell, a variety of lenders took different approaches as to how they would select a specific customer base and generate potential offers to prospective or existing customers through different channels. This is all driven by economic conditions, product competition, fraud/losses, household penetration, product diversity, market saturation, etc.
There's a lot of complexity involved to ensure there's compliance with any prospective pre-screened offer based on regulatory requirements and of course, the Card Act.
Depending on the product, portfolio segmentation, life cycle and derived revenue, lenders decide on their own criteria (internal and external) to determine what is pre-qualified, pre-selected, and/or pre-approved. Some lenders have much more sophisticated software and AI that can yield better results, and it also depends on any customized criteria that's provided to external vendors when mining CRA data (and other sources and databases) for any marketing offers. Bottom line, all offers are pre-screened and the regulatory disclosure is always required. The pre-screening criteria varies, though, on a variety of data elements that would yield a customer elegible for the targeted product.
So, that said, typically a pre-qualified or pre-approved offer bears more weight on having met the majority of a lender's internal criteria for an approval than a run-of-the-mill pre-selected offer. The lender can still adjust or tweak the criteria (depending on the product) and decline the offer based on additional built-in parameters.
