Credit Cards Blog

It’s a bad time to have bad credit. A quarterly survey of bank risk professionals released today from FICO reveals that while 73 percent of respondents expect the volume of credit applications to increase or stay flat over the next six months, 46 percent think approval criteria will get stricter and 38 percent believe the

You might be aware that your credit card can get declined if you travel overseas, but did you know it could get declined out of state? Certain changes in behavior can set off fraud controls set up by the card issuer. Every swipe of your credit card transmits data to the issuing bank, such as

Have you ever been told by your bank during a branch visit that you’ve been preapproved for a credit card? How about while paying for a purchase at a retail store? In the future, even consumers that have no credit file at the major credit reporting agencies may receive such offers for credit cards. Those

Watch out for “professional” credit card offers, an article in The Wall Street Journal warned over the weekend. The WSJ reported that card issuers have recently ramped up their marketing of corporate and business credit cards to consumers. Some 47 million professional card offers were mailed in the first quarter of 2010, an increase of

A small myFICO survey of parents with college-age children reveals that while a whopping 82 percent of parents say they’ve talked to their kids about the importance of credit, nearly half  are uninformed about a restriction in the Credit CARD Act that makes it harder for adults under the age of 21 to get a credit card.

The third batch of provisions from the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act (Credit CARD Act) of 2009 took effect Sunday. The new rules limit penalty fees on credit cards, require evaluations of rate increases every six months and extend the life of gift cards. The CARD Act has been rolling out in stages from

Customer satisfaction with credit cards has rebounded this year from a three-year low in 2009, according to a new study from J.D. Power and Associates. Overall credit card satisfaction with the top 10 issuers averaged 714 on a 1,000-point scale for 2010, up 9 points from 705 last year. The study, in its fourth year,

This Sunday, the final batch of provisions from the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act (Credit CARD Act) of 2009 takes effect. The Aug. 22 rules, which you can read about in more detail in the Bankrate feature, “New credit card rules limit penalty fees,” restrict credit card penalty fees in most cases to

Do you wish your credit cards came with spending controls? As reported by the New York Times on Friday, Citigroup will become the first U.S. bank to issue debit and credit cards that feature inControl, an appropriately-named service from MasterCard that lets consumers set spending limits and transaction alerts on their MasterCards. According to the

Yesterday the Federal Reserve Board issued an interim final rule that postpones certain aspects of the gift card rules required under the Credit CARD Act to take effect on Aug. 22, 2010. The CARD Act requires that gift cards can’t expire in less than five years since the last load of funds. It also limits