Prime cards only?

[jetsfan2013]

A friend of mine mentioned he has closed cards issued by *Tier 2* companies, essentially everyone who isnt Chase, Citi, Amex, Barclays, or BofA. Once he did that his score went up over 40 pts. His belief is that the Synchrony and Comneity Banks of the world drag your score down.

He has no data points other than what he did over the summer, however has anyone else scrubbed their credit report to only include prime cards?

[Anonymous]

Challenge him to go back and analyze his earlier reports compared to the most current. My bet is he will find other factors. Scores are derived via mathematical algorithm and I haven’t seen any way that they care about who issues credit, other than a couple instances where major vs retail has seemed to matter (using a major as your AZEO card vs using a retail card, for example).

[Anonymous]

it probably has nothing to do with who the issuer is. without more data you can only guess why his score went up. you didn't even say what his starting and ending score was.

[VanderSnoot]

Comenity and Synchrony are usually store cards, and I thought there was evidence that store cards reduce your score (I know they hurt your insurance scores). However, I don't recall that it was as much as 40 points.

But dig around the forum and doublecheck that, because as I keep typing, I'm beginning to remember that the score effect was only on an earlier FICO model that is no longer used.

[CreditInspired]

OP

I just want to respond to the term "Tier 2" cards. No such thing here on myFICO. There are prime cards (banks), store cards and SCT (retail), and subprime (predatory) lenders. 

[AverageJoesCredit]

Sync and Comenity do have prime cards .

[Anonymous]

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@jetsfan2013 wrote:
A friend of mine mentioned he has closed cards issued by *Tier 2* companies, essentially everyone who isnt Chase, Citi, Amex, Barclays, or BofA. Once he did that his score went up over 40 pts. His belief is that the Synchrony and Comneity Banks of the world drag your score down.

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His score didn't go up at all from the closure of store cards.  In fact, the only side effect of closing a bunch of cards could potentially be a score drop, as aggregate utilization could be inflated due to your overall limit denominator being reduced and the percentage of accounts you have with a balance could increase due to the overall number of accounts being reduced.

[Brian_Earl_Spilner]

Did he happen to get those scores from credit karma?

[jetsfan2013]

Thanks for the clarity. He had store(retail) however he referenced them as Tier 2.

[jetsfan2013]

Scores were from here fwiw