Originally Posted by
kennycrudup
Thanks for this, Chris. What's interesting is both my Plat (and Gold, which I'm hanging onto, just-in-case, 'till later this year when its first-time annual fee is due) are showing up on EQ and TU as "Account Type: Open Account" and "Account Status: Open", but on EX as "Credit Card: Revolving Terms"/"Account Status: Open" with "Terms" of "1 Month". Is that equivalent for purposes of scoring?
Experian is the nutcase of the 3 major CRAs...so it figures they'd be different.
The real question here is, What information on your report does FICO use to identify a charge card vs. a credit card?
There are two possibilities: The model may pick up on the "Terms: 1 Month" in order to identify a charge card vs. a credit card, or it may pick up on "Account Type: Open" for a charge card vs. "Account Type: Revolving" for a credit card.
I am unsure exactly what method FICO uses to make the determination, though the results I described in my previous post are accurate as to how the model treats Amex account types.
If FICO uses only the "Account Type" notation, and not the "Terms" notation, then in all likelihood Experian's misclassification of the account type may be hurting your FICO score.
You could find out for certain by pulling all 3 reports and, assuming everything to be equal between experian and at least one of your other reports, the FICO score generated from your Experian report would likely trend slightly lower than the score generated by the other identical bureau report that has the charge card coded as "Open" rather than "Revolving", assuming both that you have a balance on your charge card and that the balance is not under 50% or so of your highest-ever balance.