Apple Card Moving from Goldman Sachs to JPMorgan Chase

Article Comments
21

I blame this more on Goldman. I remember when the Card first came out, Goldman was eager to get into consumer lending and was accepting everyone. If you were a risk, they’d just give you a higher interest rate and lower credit limit.

But since Apple wouldn’t let them charge late fees (a policy I don’t really understand), those delinquents had little to fear and there were too many of them. I think Goldman later tightened their policies, but they basically shot themselves in the foot and are now paying for it.

What I am really curious to see is what Apple Card terms will change with the deal with Chase. I bet some features – like no late fees – might be gone.

22

I also seem to remember the Apple Card received negative press and social media attention early on due to denial and low credit limit decisions. So Apple, as TBT people know is often quick to react to bad news stories, might have pressured Marcus to loosen its lending standards for Apple Card. GS’ aspirations for Marcus helped make the move an apparent win-win for both parties.

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23

Just wondering if you go to a local post office to mail your credit card payment checks. There’s been a lot of theft of mail with checks in them around here, apparently because the “arrow” keys used by USPS employees to access mailboxes (including those in apartment buildings and condos, as well as the outdoor “cluster” [well, those are the first two syllables] mailboxes in almost any housing built since the mid-’80s) are getting stolen at gunpoint from mail carriers.

I guess I have a hard time seeing any downside in using Apple Pay to pay partial or complete card balances with Apple Card. It’s certainly nice to get a confirmation of payment in under a minute from making the payment.

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24

My area was built in 2000 but every house has its own separate mail box in front of it. Previously I lived on 10 acres in a rural area with a mailbox out by the street. Only problem I had there was when someone hit it and broke the 4x4 post. I replaced it with a 6” diameter iron pipe! Otherwise no mail theft problems locally at either residence in the last 36 years. Now mail disappearing in USPS hubs is another matter!

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25

21 posts were split to a new topic: Apple Card interface (and Wallet app)

28

I would give Apple an F- on their Apple Card. Have never been approved! Every time I purchase a new product from Apple (MacBook Pro, iPhone, whatever ) I apply for their stupid card as I like the idea of the Daily Cash back and spreading the purchase over monthly installments.

But it is never approved. And I’ve had good credit scores for decades, always 800+, credit card and mortgage payments made on time. Sounds like a pretty good credit risk, eh?

No reason ever given for denial and of course there is no person to talk with to find out what the problem is. So I use other cards. Have one now that gives a 5% kickback on gasoline purchases. If you live in California you know the price of gasoline here and can see that is a BIG deal.

29

In the US, credit card issuers are required by federal law to inform applicants the reason(s) for a new card denial.

There are many sources for details on the regulations. Here is one, provided by a well-known do-it-yourself-legal book publisher:

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30

You’re also entitled to a free credit report any time you’re turned down – a good idea to check up on it because a decline could indicate an error in your report that you need to get fixed.

Getting declined for Apple Card is weird, too, as apparently Apple pressured Goldman to rarely deny anyone. This sounds like an error of some kind – definitely something worth investigating, even if you really don’t need/want the card.

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31

Have you done a credit freeze at all of the credit agencies? If you have them all frozen and you don’t lift the freeze temporarily for the Apple Credit application, I would think that would cause this to happen.

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33

@ “Since I couldn’t do either with the Apple Card, I got rid of it.”

I pay mine monthly via bill pay from my bank. GS willingly gave me the correct mailing address for payment checks back when the Apple Card was first being distributed. But apparently the bank couldn’t figure out how to transfer the funds electronically so they send a check rather than using the cheaper and faster electronic transfer of funds. Takes four business days from the time I hit send to Apple’s acknowledgment of payment.

34

Well that explains why I had a sudden drop of, coincidentally, six points. I got a note that Discover was not going to renew my card if there wasn’t some activity on it. So I used it once the next time I had a charge. And two months later my FICO score dropped six points. Two months after that, it recovered. I never bothered to try and find out why.

35

How does GS know which Apple Card account to credit? Do you make any mention of your Apple ID on that check?

42

You know how to find your Apple Credit Card number don’t you? Your bank bill pay widget will ask for your account number. In this case, use the Apple Credit Card number.

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43

I already have a Chase credit card (as well as a rarely-used bank account and a mortgage I’m co-signed on), so I use the chase website quite often, and I’m wondering if Chase will just add Apple Card as an account on the site, with the same options all their credit cards have. So, iPhone management will remain, but Chase will also have web / app options for people who prefer to manage accounts that way.

I guess we’ll see.

Really the only thing I don’t like about Apple Card now is the inability to download transactions and statements until after the month is over. Everything else about it is fine with me, but really I use Apple Card mostly for the 2% and 3% cash back for tap-to-pay purchases. That’s really all I use it for - though I now use it for Amazon purchases, mostly to distinguish mine from my wife’s, who uses another card. It’s probably past time to get an Amazon card for those, though.

44

I suspect it will.

I’ve had similar behavior with a GM MasterCard. Over the years I’ve had it (since 1991), it has switched underwriting from Household Bank to HSBC to Capital One, to Goldman Sachs Marcus and now to Barclays. Each time, web access to the account has moved to the new bank’s web site.

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48

Well, I was told they slashed my credit limit in half because that was as high as I had ever charged on the card in the 27 years I’ve had it!

3 Feb 26 Yesterday, another card issuer sent me a letter that they planned on damaging my credit rating by slashing my limit in half. Same reasoning: I don’t max the card out every month and I pay the balance off every month. This time I called them and asked why they wanted to damage my credit rating and lo-and-behold the agent on the phone said they would not make the change.

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49

I’ve wondered for years why credit card issuers have not started harassing me to charge more or risk losing my card, or threatening to cut my limit for the same reason. By any reasonable (by card-issuing bank) standards, I’m a bum when it comes to using my cards. I always pay their bills on time, and have for the 40+ years I’ve had one or more cards. (When I was in graduate school, in the 1970s, it was actually hard to get a credit card if you didn’t already have one.) With one exception: My wife, our first kid, and I were living in France for six months in 1992 while I was working on a sabbatical-like appointment there. My wife’s brother-in-law, an academic working on the side for US AID, frequently had to commute from the heartland to DC (near where we lived) for meetings with his government bosses, so we gave him free use of the house, as long as he kept the place reasonably clean (which he sort of did) and forwarded non-junk mail to us every couple of weeks. In those almost-pre-Internet days, there were no electronic bills, much less online bill pay. One month, we didn’t get the expected package of mail from the BiL, and I simply spaced that, despite using my “carte crédit américaine,” at least until my bank in France got around to issuing me a debit card, I hadn’t received a bill. Sure enough, the next month, we did get a package of mail from the BiL, and it included a bill from Citi (iirc) with a late charge and interest for the unpaid charges from the previous month. Quel horreur! I called the card’s overseas toll-free number and threw myself on their mercies (of a bank?). Amazingly enough, they looked at my payment record and said, “You’ve paid on time for years and years, no problem, we’ll erase the late charge as long as you pay the interest.” “Deal,” I said.

And that is the only time I’ve ever not paid a credit card on time. Is it sentimentality that my card issuers haven’t tossed me overboard for not paying interest? Are they hoping against hope I’ll run up a $10K balance some month? Or do they actually look at the sum of the issuer fees they’ve gotten on every purchase and decide to settle for that?

If anyone here works for the card-issuance part of a bank or credit union, I’d be really interested to know why the OP got harassed and threatened, and I’ve gotten nothing but smiley faces.

Part 2 of overly long post: a few years after I got my Apple Card, I exceeded 20% of my credit limit on the card, and my credit rating took a ~ 20 point nosedive. I asked GS for a higher limit, and iirc, got turned down initially, but was informed they weren’t able to access my credit report. I asked which reporting agency they used, unfroze my records with them, and reapplied to GS online — and was granted the increased limit in under a second after I clicked on “Submit.” Then, of course, I refroze my records with that agency.

50

Two reasons I can think of:

  1. They don’t only make money from annual fees and interest. They also make money from the merchant fees they charge the stores from which you’re buying.

    I assume that if proposed legislation trying to limit merchant fees gets passed, that we’re going to start seeing most formerly-free cards switch over to having “membership” fees, and massively cutting back on other perks (like rewards programs).

  2. If the industry as a whole started canceling customers with good credit in order to focus on those with poor payment habits, the public backlash would be tremendous. It would likely cripple the industry as everybody with good credit moves to other forms of payment like debit cards and electronic wire transfers (and maybe even paper checks).

I’d also love to know. I too have never paid an interest charge in over 30 years, and nobody has threatened to lower my credit limits or cancel my cards.

51

True. Years ago my late wife was asked by the bank she had at the time to sign up for a fee-based card and she declined. The banker asked her if they permanently waived the fee would she do so. Her reply was she wasn’t the type of CC customer they wanted because she paid the card off in full every month. To which the banker said she was wrong, she was the type customer they wanted. So she got the card and a signed statement that the annual fee was waived permanently. Through a few banking acquisitions the card ended up being issued by BoA and was only cancelled by me after she had passed in 2022. There were a couple of times in the many years that the fee came up but each time she took the letter in and the fees were cancelled/waived.

52

I only paid annual fees at the very beginning, when I was in college and was glad to have any card - it was one of those cards that anyone can get by presenting a student ID.

A few years later, I qualified for and got a GM card, which has never had a fee. There’s a fun story about that one. GM called me asking me to subscribe (presumably because I bought a GM car and was paying off a GMAC loan for it). I declined because, being in college, I didn’t have steady income and didn’t think I’d qualify. A few minutes later, a supervisor (who was monitoring the call) called me back and said that my GMAC payment history is enough to qualify. So I applied for that card.

Then when the first card came up for its annual fee, I called them and said I want to cancel, because I have a no-fee card and I don’t want to pay a fee for theirs. They waived the fee. They waived it for the next two years. Then they didn’t and I cancelled it. And that was the last time I ever had a card with an annual fee.

Today, I still have the GM card, although I rarely use it (rewards that can only be redeemed on GM vehicles is not as attractive as it used to be).

The one I use most is the Costco Visa card. This is a Visa Signature card (the high-end version that includes things like travel and concierge services). Signature cards normally have a high annual fee, but this one is free to Costco members (and it will cancel itself if your Costco membership terminates).

You can often find similar deals (waiving the fees on high-end cards) from banks and investment firms, if your account is large enough. Which might be the case if you’ve been working for a while and have your retirement accounts with them.

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