Brightway OneMain.... 😡

[creditn00bAt40]

I had a balance of 452/1000 on my brightway card, and made a $452 payment on the 15th. I kept checking and seeing that while the payment was listed in the payment history and had posted same day , the dashboard was still showing a balance. I then noticed I had an interest charge on the 17th. I became concerned they were gonna report me at 45% utilization and sent a preemptive email which went unanswered. On the 18th I got a million different notifications from credit monitoring services informing me my credit had dropped. They didn't report me at 45, they reported me at 52 due to annual fee hitting. I fired off an angry email but now I'm second guessing myself, wondering if i messed up. 

Hello,

I attempted to contact you via email 1/18, and also made 2 phone calls to your customer service line. As I explained in my previous email, a payment was not credited to my account and consequently interest was applied and the data you furnished the credit bureaus was over 50% utilization. This has caused my credit score to drop into a lower range, which may result in other creditors taking adverse action against me. When I spoke to your customer service agent she informed me that you had a 'system update' that caused the error. She made no attempt to address it on my behalf, instead offering to give me the phone number of your dispute department. I am stunned that a credit card that markets itself as an ally to the subprime borrower and a tool for building credit would knowingly cause harm with erroneous credit reporting, and then let that stand and take the weekend off while your customers scramble to contain the fallout. Please credit my account properly with the $450 payment I made, reverse the interest charge, update credit bureaus or at least address the disputes I filed with each, remove the annual fee and close my account immediately. 

With dismay,

Jacquelyn Holt 

Apologies in advance for the TL;DR

[GreatLife]

At time you submitted payment what were the present statement due & end dates - and what's the current statement start date? What date did FI debit the funds from your payment source?

[creditn00bAt40]

@GreatLife The statement runs from 12/18 - 1/17. Due date is the 14th but I had no payment due because the only charge on the account was incurred 1/12. My payment of $450 posted the 15th that would have brought the account to $0. On the 17th I was charged interest of $6.64 as if the payment I made hadn't posted. I was also charged an annual fee of $65 on the 17th, so they reported my balance as $521 out of 1000 total credit line. I used to have regularly maxed out cards, and have worked very hard to change my spending, pay stuff down and figure out how billing cycles work so that I never had an account report over 50% utilization. Since then I have worked even harder to get all my balances below 30%, and was only just starting to see my credit score reach unprecedented heights when this happened which is I think why I had such an emotional response to the 50 percent thing

[GZG]

the thing with subprime cards is that they are typically just pretty slow with payments and you don't get the seamlessness that you get with the bigger, more established issuers 

it's really unfortunate that the payment wasn't reflected in their credit reporting, but it's not like they didn't count your payment for the sake of your bill, it just wasn't soon enough for their slow payment system to accept it for the purposes of credit reporting 

so, yeah, they shouldn't have reported your balance as 52% utilization, that's inaccurate and you can (as you already have) dispute it and show proof of your current utilization and get that changed. 

but that's not going to change the fact that pretty much all subprime lenders have slow moving payment systems and that's not likely to change anytime soon. your credit score wasn't permanently harmed by them reporting this balance, the next month the credit would have improved when they reported the lesser balance. you could have asked if they would off-cycle report the balance for the inconvenience (as you already have) as an alternative to disputing the balance directly with the CRA's. 

the interest charge wasn't legitimate from the previous month's balances?

[creditn00bAt40]

@GZG 

This, yes. 100%. And I should never have let such a consequential charge hit just prior to closing, the week prior to a holiday weekend. I should have seen this coming. And you're right, the service is slower and lower quality rhan, say, Discover, who will do off-cycle reporting upon request. I was definitely expecting too much from customer service when I called. 

Edited to add: the payment isn't actually reflected on my bill, either in my dashboard or on my new statement. The only place I see it is I see the payments section. And my $452-lighter bank account, heh