@Anonymous wrote:I just got an alert that an account that has been inactive has reported a balance, It's my Amex ED that reported a balance of $1. The thing is that the account is active every month, I just pay it before the statement cuts. Another weird thing is that it shows my high balance as $21 when, in fact, my high balance was $1025. The latter is the same across all CRA's. What's the deal with Amex reporting?
It's a configurable setting for Scorewatch which is the OEM product of EQ's in the 3B monitoring solution. Ignore it, has nothing to do with FICO, and only has anything to do with the monitoring solution. Fraud prevention for SD'd cards I guess.
Where are you seeing the $21? There are some parse errors historically on a MF pull in my experience.
@Anonymous wrote:
@Revelate wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:I just got an alert that an account that has been inactive has reported a balance, It's my Amex ED that reported a balance of $1. The thing is that the account is active every month, I just pay it before the statement cuts. Another weird thing is that it shows my high balance as $21 when, in fact, my high balance was $1025. The latter is the same across all CRA's. What's the deal with Amex reporting?
It's a configurable setting for Scorewatch which is the OEM product of EQ's in the 3B monitoring solution. Ignore it, has nothing to do with FICO, and only has anything to do with the monitoring solution. Fraud prevention for SD'd cards I guess.
Where are you seeing the $21? There are some parse errors historically on a MF pull in my experience.
Everywhere I pull reports, including all the free ones, as well as MyFico and CreditCheck Total. It shows that on all three reports. All of my other cards correctly report what the actual high balance was. For example, my NFL card reports $512 even though I also paid that before the statement cut.
I don't know if Amex reports interstitial balances like Barclays or BOFA, not all lenders do; was the $21 your max statement balance? I know mine are statement balances for Amex but with my payment strategy it would be really rare for me to hit an instertitial high especially these days as I don't sweat it anyway.
We've had reports previously (talking a couple years ago that I can recall) that Amex would reset the Highest Balance every so often but I haven't seen that on my reports yet which could be another issue. I spot check my reports when I pull them for that after hearing it still as I don't quite accept that one TBH.
@iv wrote:
@Revelate wrote:We've had reports previously (talking a couple years ago that I can recall) that Amex would reset the Highest Balance every so often but I haven't seen that on my reports yet which could be another issue. I spot check my reports when I pull them for that after hearing it still as I don't quite accept that one TBH.Don't know about Amex doing that... but Discover certainly does.
And not the kind of "X-years trailing High Balance" that you'd expect, either.
For example:
In May 2009, Discover reported $14,983 as both current balance and high balance. (Which was then PIF, of course.)
For the next three years, that $14,983 remained as the reported High Balance, as the statement balances during that time stayed in the $0 to $4k range.
But in May 2012, the High Balance was reset to the then-current balance of $404 - ignoring all of the prior higher balances during that period, even the $882 that had reported the month before.
Odd.
It certainly adjusts upwards as you'd expect (the following month reported $1,153 and the High Balance followed) - the oddity seems limited to times the High Balance stays static for three years - that appears to cause a straight reset.
Other random data points:
Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Chase appear to never reset at all (all reporting the same High Balance they did 10+ years ago). Actually, in the case of BoA, that same reported High Balance stayed the same from the MBNA MC it started as, through a BoA Visa, and now a BoA "Amex"; and for DW's Chase cards, the same reported High Balances survived the Providian/WaMu/Chase dance, and at least one PC since.
I'm curious to see what Amex does - I'm likely to set a set a high balance during this year on the BCE that will be paid off and then not exceeded for several years - so I'll keep an eye on it.
Interesting! Thank you for the datapoint on Discover and others; I'll actually start looking at my high balance reporting closely when I start coming up on the 3 year mark Amex (two different tradelines) next year. Wouldn't be the worst thing ever on the BCP, though cashnocredit's findings on EQ FICO 8 if the Zync gets reset that'll be a little miffing, but not likely to really use that card much other than big purchase time anyway going forward in the future in which case FICO isn't really a big concern at that point.