No credit card required
Browse credit cards from a variety of issuers to see if there's a better card for you.
In the past and in the future?
I really have no opinion on Equifax. I didn't free my Equifax because it would create more problems than necessary for me. I do monitor my reports so if an inquiry came in that I didn't approve of, I'd deal with it then.
Equifax is like any major financial corporation that has data to secure: they did a poor job, they'll be penalized for it, and then they'll go on to doing a poor job again until they're caught again.
In my own experience, in 25 years of building and rebuilding credit, Equifax was the easiest to deal with every time. My EQ score is the highest because they've never said no to my requests yet, but I do write really good requests.
Once upon a time, Equifax was primarily viewed as a service used mostly by auto lenders. That was back in the '80s when I was just starting out. All the auto lenders used EQ, almost exlusively. Now it seems a lot of CU's use them as well. Maybe because CU's do a lot of auto lending? I think it is still the least used of the big 3 in any case.
@AverageJoesCredit wrote:
If Equifax was an animal it would be a whale......
It blows
AJC Equifax is like vacuum cleaner.....
It sucks
My opinion: Equifax is part of an oligopoly, so they can pretty much do anything and not go anywhere. Their stock price has already recovered half of their losses from the breach earlier this year, and I imagine by this time next year your typical American won't even remember what happened.
@kilroy8 wrote:Once upon a time, Equifax was primarily viewed as a service used mostly by auto lenders. That was back in the '80s when I was just starting out. All the auto lenders used EQ, almost exlusively. Now it seems a lot of CU's use them as well. Maybe because CU's do a lot of auto lending? I think it is still the least used of the big 3 in any case.
EX > EQ > TU.
Had different regional affinities and EX / EQ were West and East coast respectively and the bulk of the population lives in those.
You get some oddities like USAA that uses EQ, principally because dealing with a lot of military stationed on the coasts or nearby, they could've picked one or the other and been set.
This was back in the old days when it cost a lot more both in time and real money to report, so it was regionalized as many places only reported to a single bureau. These days with most places reporting to all 3, it's less of an issue.