Chase Making More Changes to Card Holder Policy

It seems that Chase card services is finally taking a proactive approach in improving its relationship with its customers. After all of the scrutiny the credit card industry has recently received, with Congress looking seriously into imposing stricter legislation on credit card companies, many of these companies have already made some pretty major changes to the way they do business. Yet, for some reason, Chase held strong to its card holder policies and was slow at making any changes.

Just this past week, however, Chase finally relented, announcing that it will be making some changes starting in March. According to these changes, the company will no longer automatically push the interest rates of its cardholders up when their credit scores go down. According to its statement, the company feels that using an alternative approach to evaluating credit in lieu of the traditional method of scoring to determine what APR’s to assign to their customers.

Chase did already make one change, which was doing away with the universal default policy that many card issuers used to follow.  With universal default, the company would increase the customer’s interest rate if the customer made a late payment on ANY account in its credit file.

Although Chase is finally making these changes, I’d love to see them go even further. Chase is notorious for using the Two Cycle Average Daily Balance method to compute finance charges. For many cardholders, this results in paying substantially more in finance charges than with the standard Average Daily Balance method. Yet, since so many people are unaware of the fact that there are different methods used to compute finance charges, they typically don’t even know they’re paying more than they have to.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 3:36 pm and is filed under Credit Card News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.