We’re reposting this as it seems Bank of America also doesn’t do a hard pull when you’re an existing customer and you’re denied.
When you’re signing up for a lot of credit cards, one of the things that you want to minimize is the number of hard pulls on your credit report. This is because hard credit pulls (or inquiries) affect your FICO score, unlike soft pulls. A hard credit pull stays on your credit report for a period of two years and will affect your FICO score for one year.
[Read: How to get your FICO score for free]
We’ve talked about tactics to minimize hard pulls in the past, sometimes it’s possible to get multiple inquiries from the same bank combined if you apply for multiple cards in the same day for example. As part of my credit card strategy, I also try to spread my inquiries over all three of the credit bureaus as well.
When you get denied for a credit card, it’s a double whammy. Most credit card issuers will do a hard pull on your credit report, not like what they see and then deny you. This leaves you with a hard pull on your report and no sign up bonus to show for it. Fortunately not all credit card issuers do this, some will do a soft pull to see if they will approve or deny you and then only do the hard pull when they approve you.
Let’s have a look at the banks that won’t do a hard pull if you’re denied. Since most financial institutions don’t do this, we will only list the ones that do. If we’re missing any, please let us know in the comments.
American Express
If you read Frequent Miler’s blog, you’ll probably already be aware of this as I shared this with Julian in the past for a Bet You Didn’t Know Post? If you’re an existing cardholder with American Express they will use your existing credit report they have on file to see if you’re eligible, if you pass this check they will do a hard pull to recheck your credit report before finally approving you.
This means that most of the time if you’re denied, no hard pull will have been done as they will have denied you based on the existing information they already had access to. If there has been a significant change to your credit report between when they last did a soft pull and when you applied for the card, it’s possible that a hard pull will be done and you will be denied but in most circumstances this will not be the case.
American Express usually do a soft pull once a month or so to check everything is in order, so the chances that your credit has changed drastically in one month that you would go from being approved to denied is small. Keep in mind this only works if you’re a current American Express cardholder (and the card must be issued by American Express and not just running on their payment network).
Barclaycard
Barclaycard seems to work the same way as American Express, as long as you’re an existing cardholder and you’re denied a soft pull will be done unless your credit has changed significantly recently. One thing to keep in mind is that Barclaycard is quite inquiry sensitive, so if you’ve recently applied for a lot of cards you might be denied and still receive the hard pull as they will consider this a significant change and deny you when they repull your credit report.
Bank of America
There are now two separate reports (1 ,2) of Bank of America not doing a hard pull if you’re denied and have at least one credit card with Bank of America already.
Other Card Issuers
Have you received a soft pull when you’ve been denied with any other card issuers? If so let us know in the comments below. As always, all of this stuff is your mileage may vary, if you’ve had a different experience than listed above then let us know as well as any ways your credit might have changed a lot just before you applied for the card (e.g high credit utilization, late payment, lots of applications etc etc).
