Capital One Financial Corporation is a Fortune 500 company headquartered in Virginia, USA. This financial holding company serves small businesses consumers and commercial clients with a variety of financial products and services. Its subsidiaries include Capital One, N.A., and Capital One Bank (USA). It has branches located in New York, New Jersey, Texas, Louisiana, Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia. This company is included in the S&P 100 index and the stocks are traded under the symbol “COF” on the New York Stock Exchange. By offering a variety of credit card choices, easy credit tracking and free access to credit scores of the consumers, Capital One has been one of the largest and most respected credit card issuers in America and has over 63 million credit card accounts that are active. With the launch of its application called ‘CreditTracker’ in 2014, this bank had helped millions of Americans to easily track their credit scores. But soon, several other banks joined in the league with their products. In the wake of these developments, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had recommended top credit card issuing companies to provide free services to access the credit scores of their customers. Citing this recommendation, Capital One decided to upgrade their product to make credit monitoring easier for everyone including the non-cardholders. This led to the launch of the rebranded extension of its app in 2016, renamed as ‘CreditWise’ in order to stay ahead of its competition. Capital One is the first major bank in the league to offer a free app (for both apple and android users) or website for seeing individual credit profiles and monitoring credit scores to all Americans irrespective of whether they are consumers of Capital One products and services or not. This enables the public to control their financial well-being by providing easy access and tracking of credit scores. This is enabling more consumers to make well-informed financial decisions and thereby improve their profile with sufficient information about the credit score gap. Apart from the access given to non-members to sign-up for credit accounts with free access to their scores, the rebranded version and the next generation of this popular app has come with additional features, some of which are as discussed below:
Advantages:
It is free of cost for sign-up and all tracking of credit scores
Anyone (including those without a Capital One card or those without any card) can sign up for an account with CreditWise that is free of any charges. This also includes free and unlimited access to their TransUnion VantageScore 3.0 credit score. Also, free weekly updates of the Vantage credit scores can be availed either on the computer or on smartphones.
It is very user-friendly
The app is very interactive, and you will find it easy to visualize and understand a difficult concept of credit scoring. It lets you break down the individual category to have an easy tracking and monitoring of your spending patterns that are affecting your credit scores.
It offers cards to meet all types of credit profile: Irrespective of your credit scores or profile, Capital One has a card to meet every need.
It offers an excellent credit simulator: This is a customizable tool where various permutation and combinations of influencing factors can be used to simulate the impact of your financial decisions on your VantageScore. Around 17 pre-defined financial moves that can affect the credit scores like applying for a mortgage loan, paying down debt, miss in on-time bill payments, etc. are built into the simulator to get a better image of their impact on credit score in the short term and long term.
Provides credit history: CreditWise allows you view the details of all open and closed lines of credit like real estate, credit cards, personal loans, etc. that has an impact on your TransUnion credit score change. Also, a detailed information of individual account balance summary with score breakdown can be availed thereby letting you manage your credit profile better.
It generates summary reports: This can help you to make any improvements by viewing the ups and downs in your scores in the form of a line graph for credit score influencing factors like payment punctuality, amount of available credit used, etc.
It notifies you for score changes: Either a mobile or e-mail based notification will be sent to you whenever there is a change or update in your credit score. This allows you to access your credit information only when relevant and required which will reduce damages to your scores with random credit checks thereby reducing the negative impact on your score.
It updates your credit information weekly: As against many tools and services that provide monthly updates of credit information, CreditWise gives you weekly updates about your credit events making it easier to access and closely monitor your profile especially while applying for certain loans.
Although CreditWise is the most popular credit tracking tool in America, it has its own set of limitations
It offers only one credit score: TransUnion’s VantageScore 3.0 is the only credit score offered by CreditWise. Hence, you will have to use some other free credit-scoring service if you need to track yourself with the most commonly used FICO scores or your vantage scores from the other bureaus like Experian or Equifax.
Qualifying pre-requisites: You will be eligible to sign up for the CreditWise app only if you are at least 18 years of age and possess a valid Social Security number.
However, irrespective of the limitations, CreditWise has allowed people to successfully keep track of their credit scores.
