Across standard credit cards, average interest rates held steady. Fixed-rate cards remained at 13.42 percent, and variable-rate cards at 11.62 percent. The average for all fixed-rate standard, gold and platinum cards came down 10 basis points to 11.78 percent. Variable-rate cards fell 6 basis points to 11.28 percent.

Good news for authorized users. Last week Fair Isaac announced that the latest scoring model, called FICO 08, will include authorized user accounts in its calculations, which reverses the original plan to have FICO 08 ignore authorized user accounts.

The exclusion was aimed at stymieing the practice of piggybacking, which allowed those with bad credit to pay a fee and get added as an authorized user on the credit card of someone with stellar credit, thereby inflating a low FICO score.

FICO 08 shouldn't penalize legitimate authorized users -- that is, authorized users on a family member's account -- but may treat piggybackers differently. The company says its new analytic approach "minimizes the impact" those accounts can have on the score.

-- Leslie McFadden

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