Originally Posted by
jsk1973
Thanks. I have only two Citi cards, both opened in December (a Prestige and an AAdvantage that had a Dec. 31 offer expiration).
I certainly understand banks needing to be careful with underwriting, but it's kind of surprising that AT&T, or any store, would allow its card's issuer to tell customers to come back in 65 days. We're talking about a store card and a $1,000 credit line here, not a new $5,000 or $10,000 or $20,000+ card.
Citi will not "tell" you to come back in 65 days. Citi will let you apply for the card right now, and they'll deny you. It's just how their systems are set up.
We'll tell you that if you don't want to be denied, you should wait 65 days. The denial letter Citi will send you (if you apply now) will say 60 days, but Citi can't count, and we have had documented cases where Citi has done the 60-day denial at 62 or even 63 days. So 65 days is the number we came up with the seems to be 100% safe.
The specific Citi rule wording is "no more than 2 credit card applications in any 60 day period". That's what the denial letter spells out when you violate the 65-day rule.
Please realize, it is a tiny minority of people who are AT&T customers who apply for cards as rapidly (including two at a time) as you do. The vast majority of AT&T customers have never applied for two cards in the same year, let alone two cards on the same day. So now way will AT&T care that one (and only one) of their customers can't get the AT&T Access More card right away because that customer reached the limit of applying for credit cards at Citi temporariliy.
There's
way more AT&T customers who simply don't have good enough credit to be approve for the AT&T Access More card. I doubt AT&T is telling Citi "approve these people, no matter what their credit is", though!
It's your "unusual" (outside of FlyerTalk) action of applying for two Citi cards as fast as possible that caused this problem for you. I don't see why AT&T would be interested in that.
And, btw, there are limits
of some sort at every bank (on how fast you can apply for cards). They're just not "documented" as clearly at other banks as they are at Citi. So anyone who applies for lots of credit cards at
any bank and suddenly wants/needs another one for a specific reason can run into this problem; it's not Citi-specific, except that with Citi you know up front you'll be denied in these circustances, while at other banks you can't know exact when you will or won't be denied because the bank never documented the rules in any way.