Marla Blow knows first hand what credit card companies look for in applicants. She did help establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and worked at Capital One for about seven years.
But when she was looking at the products available to consumers, she noticed everyone was targeting the same type of consumer: The ones with excellent credit and rich credit histories. Few were trying to help the subprime consumers — people who have struggled financially in the past and need help rebuilding their credit score.
I'll believe it when I see the fee structure and just how low they can go with credit scores.
There are others that have done this, not all of them are secured, but virtually all have non-trivial fee structures.
I don't know, she may have experience in both Cap 1 (a historically subprime lender) and the CFPB, that doesn't translate into the space where first payment defaults can be upwards of 30% if your algorithms aren't right... and I've experienced at least two organizations which don't/didn't have the right algorithms at points in time where I had a personal intersection with them.
