Originally Posted by
knowledgeispower
Thank you for that. As you can see
its not the CRA that combines hard pulls, but the issuing bank that does. This is an important distinction because the CRA ONLY will combine pulls (in terms of impact on credit score) for Mortgage's + Auto Loans, etc within 14 days usually. I think we were talking about two different things here!
You may be talking about two different things, but you're mistaken about the credit card side.
What happens is that the credit card inquiry comes into the bureau without any specifics of what card it's for. It simply mentions the bank (and its division, in some cases). So what happens when a CRA gets two seemingly-identical-looking-enough inquiries hit from the same division of the same bank on the same day, the combine them on the chance that they might duplicates of each other (and they don't want to put duplicates onto your credit report, since they know that can hurt you).
So
it does happen at the CRA end, not the bank end, for credit cards, but it's not intentional, but rather an accident of the way inquires are processed and what seems "less risky" to the CRA to do (to delete possible "duplicates" rather than to hold on to what may be "duplicates").
However: You can't depend on it without knowing when the bank sends the inquiry and whether that specific bank has different "divisions" (as far as the CRA is concerned) and how they line up.
(I doubt anyone ever applies for two mortgages or two auto loans from the
same institution on the
same day, just trying to get more rewards. So it's only in the realm of credit cards that this issue of the CRA seeing what may or may not be "duplicates" tends to come up. I don't think you can use parallels from mortgage and/or auto CRA processing thus as a good parallel for this particular "loophole".)