Between now and November 16th, 2014 Wells Fargo customers can get access to their credit report and credit scores for free. Unfortunately it’s not possible to do this online and you’ll need visit a Wells Fargo branch and speak to a banker to get your personal access code. This is the third year in a row that Wells Fargo has offered this and it coincides with “American Bankers Association’s Get Smart About Credit Day”.  “More” information can be found at https://mrm.wellsfargobank.com/freecreditscore/.
Our Thoughts
This promotion is more about getting customers into Wells Fargo branches for potential upselling/cross marketing than it is about educating consumers and providing them with useful information and tools. If Wells Fargo was doing this to purely help consumers, here’s how they should have approached it:
- Allowed consumers to easily access the information online
- A lot of people don’t have the time to visit a Wells Fargo branch
- There is no need for this to be done in person, unless Wells Fargo is using this as an opportunity to sell consumers more product
- Made it clear what credit score was being offered and whether this was the same score used by Wells Fargo for all or some of it’s lending decisions. Not all credit scoring algorithms are made equal, is the score Wells Fargo offering a FICO or FAKO score? (Hint: It’s a VantageScore which is not used as often by lenders and it’s not clear if Wells Fargo uses it for any of their lending decisions).
- Made it clear to consumers that they can access all three of their credit reports from each of the nationwide consumer reporting agencies for free from the comfort of their home from annualcreditreport.com
- Offer this service year round with both the credit report and score being updated at least monthly
- Clearly told consumers what credit reports they were getting access to and whether these were full or partial reports (e.g do Consumers get access to only their TransUnion report or all three? Is this a full report or a partial report like some free credit monitoring sites offer. Note: Credit Karma now offers full TransUnion reports).
All in all this is a very disappointing “promotion” by Wells Fargo. If they want to be serious about helping consumers, they should overhaul this promotion and run it year round. If you’d like to have access to your FICO score for free, we’d recommend reading our full list of financial institutions that currently offer this and various other methods for finding it for free.
