Alternative Lending Inquiries - Beware!

On CK, I browsed the "installment loans" options. They always say it is a SP, which it is. Sometimes I like to check to see where I land in offers in terms of interest rates.

Well....

EX alerted me to "alternative lending inquiries"!

So heads up, they are 1) likely CFAs and 2) will impact the smaller 3rd party sources, hitting you with "alternative lending inquiries", like the equivalent of payday loans and such. These inquiries are visibile on my TU report when I did a pre-approval for the Apple Card and is now permanently stuck and visible on that bureau's report.

Hard lesson learned to *not* play with CK "pre-approvals", once again!

LaHossBoss wrote: ↑Tue Apr 05, 2022 10:04 am On CK, I browsed the "installment loans" options. They always say it is a SP, which it is. Sometimes I like to check to see where I land in offers in terms of interest rates. Well.... EX alerted me to "alternative lending inquiries"! So heads up, they are 1) likely CFAs and 2) will impact the smaller 3rd party sources, hitting you with "alternative lending inquiries", like the equivalent of payday loans and such. These inquiries are visibile on my TU report when I did a pre-approval for the Apple Card and is now permanently stuck and visible on that bureau's report. Hard lesson learned to *not* play with CK "pre-approvals", once again!

Credit Karma is useful for monitoring changes in your credit reports, but all the extras they show is just a waste of space. I browse their credit cards recommendations, but would never consider going any further. How is an alternative lending inquiry even defined? If it is a soft inquiry, it should only be visible to you.

Credible wrote: ↑Tue Apr 05, 2022 10:47 am

LaHossBoss wrote: ↑Tue Apr 05, 2022 10:04 am On CK, I browsed the "installment loans" options. They always say it is a SP, which it is. Sometimes I like to check to see where I land in offers in terms of interest rates. Well.... EX alerted me to "alternative lending inquiries"! So heads up, they are 1) likely CFAs and 2) will impact the smaller 3rd party sources, hitting you with "alternative lending inquiries", like the equivalent of payday loans and such. These inquiries are visibile on my TU report when I did a pre-approval for the Apple Card and is now permanently stuck and visible on that bureau's report. Hard lesson learned to *not* play with CK "pre-approvals", once again!

Credit Karma is useful for monitoring changes in your credit reports, but all the extras they show is just a waste of space. I browse their credit cards recommendations, but would never consider going any further. How is an alternative lending inquiry even defined? If it is a soft inquiry, it should only be visible to you.

Not entirely. It doesnt say who the SP was by or when, but it will show that you have "applied" for "alternative lending" for up to 7 years and how many times! After doing a pre-approval via Apple Card, this section has now become visible on my TU CR. It is a snippet of my CoreLogic report! And another report shows CoreLogic *and* Chex! Not sure why it says Ally, because I did not app through them. This was after the Apple Card app.

Despite the different language, it's still a SP though, correct? It doesn't show that you've necessarily "applied" for anything, as a real application would of course be a HP. It's more like you're looking at pre-approvals and seeing what's out there IMO... does that seem like the case?

BrutalBodyShots wrote: ↑Tue Apr 05, 2022 3:33 pm Despite the different language, it's still a SP though, correct? It doesn't show that you've necessarily "applied" for anything, as a real application would of course be a HP. It's more like you're looking at pre-approvals and seeing what's out there IMO... does that seem like the case?

I guess my concern lies less with scoring than appearance. Does a bank find "alternative inquiries" off-putting in app decisions?

LaHossBoss wrote: ↑Tue Apr 05, 2022 7:26 pm I guess my concern lies less with scoring than appearance. Does a bank find "alternative inquiries" off-putting in app decisions?

I could see a counter argument to that though as well... if a bank sees alternative inquiries, perhaps they want to compete and could send a targeted offer, for example.

If it's a soft pull inquiry, then it's not visible to lenders when they pull your credit. So if it was an SP, then I wouldn't worry about how it might look on a manual review, since it won't look like anything.

Slabenstein wrote: ↑Thu Apr 07, 2022 1:48 am If it's a soft pull inquiry, then it's not visible to lenders when they pull your credit. So if it was an SP, then I wouldn't worry about how it might look on a manual review, since it won't look like anything.

My point is, even though the soft inquiry itself is not visible, if you get an inquiry that adds this corelogic/chex portion to your CR, I believe this is visible now in future pulls from creditors and they can see this activity, which does not specify if it is HP or SP, or by whom, just a time range and how many, so just that there has been "inquiries" into the alternative lending, even including bank accounts (depending on if one or both are added to CR).

These are not sps these are hps at alt consumer reporting agencies other than the big three. Go get a payday loan, they pull your credit report it’s just not from the big 3, it’s from core logic or one of these alternative CRAs.

Does it affect score? Well that depends, what score are you talking about? fico? Well if fico doesn’t take into account alternative CRA data, so no it does not. Are there other scoring systems in place at those bureaus? Of course there are and we’re not gonna take the time to reverse engineer those because nobody uses them enough to care I mean are we really worried about gaming for payday loan score to get a good payday loan? Lol.

But to answer the important question by boss, yes lenders do look at payday inquiries and uses certain things that are accounted for by these alternate CRAs as a negative. But they don’t get that for free they have to pay extra.