American Express used to backdate new cards (e.g when you opened a new card they would reported your member since date, rather than when the new credit card was actually opened). This practice ended on March 21st, 2015Â for new cards, cards that were already opened and reporting the old date were not affected.
Some people (here, here & here) have noticed that TransUnion are no longer backdating these cards and they are using the actual date these cards were first reported/opened instead. This doesn’t seem to be affecting everybody currently, it might be only reports that were updated after February 20th are being affected so far (please share your datapoints in the comments below).
The reason people care about this is that it affects your average age of accounts (and for some people it significantly affects this) and this is a scoring criteria for the FICO score. It should be noted that length of credit history only accounts for 15% of your FICO score and average age of accounts only counts for a small portion of that (oldest account is more important).
Hat tip to reader Jack for making me aware of this
