It finally dawned on me why the soft pulls banks rely on are so old and stale; because it's cheaper to get old news than it is to get current news.
I thought it odd that whenever Capital One does a soft pull it's always information that's a couple of months old already.
And today PenFed informed me that when it does the soft pulls it gets information that is already several months old:
The FICO scores are loaded quarterly in January, April, July, and October. When loaded in July, the scores will be from end of April/beginning of May. The next time your FICO score will be loaded is in October. The score will be from the end of August/beginning of September.
I.e. my current score won't appear on their site until January 2017. And if my score improves in December, it won't be posted until April.
No, Penfed makes the pull, and then they wait a month to post it. That's different from pulling outdated information from the bureaus. If they are waiting 4 months instead that's on them, not the bureaus (and stupid but w/e).
@Revelate wrote:No, Penfed makes the pull, and then they wait a month to post it. That's different from pulling outdated information from the bureaus. If they are waiting 4 months instead that's on them, not the bureaus (and stupid but w/e).
Why would they obtain current data and then wait 2 months to post it?
@SouthJamaica wrote:
@Revelate wrote:No, Penfed makes the pull, and then they wait a month to post it. That's different from pulling outdated information from the bureaus. If they are waiting 4 months instead that's on them, not the bureaus (and stupid but w/e).
Why would they obtain current data and then wait 2 months to post it?
Look at the date on the pulls vs when they get posted, and CSR's have admitted it as well.
My guess is they have a batch process that runs once a month which is how old school technology stacks worked when we're talking moving data from one database to another which is probably the case here: get some dataset of some size, queue up a batch insert into the database. I don't think it's a long walk to say there likely haven't that many core application infrastructure updates at many CU's since Y2K: I could be wrong as I haven't worked in one, but we've seen how long it takes to update their websites, and updating one's core business applications where there's serious risk to your business (and most lenders in general being risk adverse organizations by definition) is a whole lot more time consuming and expensive than that.
As a result I'm not really surprised, even though in this day and age it's outdated. On the flipside even if I were running the infrastructure show at Penfed, I'd make the rational decision to focus on things which earn us money first, and everything else second. Providing FICO scores to members, that's way down on the list of things to improve from that overly simplistic business analysis.
I'm just happy we get scores at all from anyone, a month late (on a score I don't care about at all), ain't no big thing to me.