when you apply for a credit card visa,sears,best buy ect do they just pull up a score and go by that or do they actually look to see whats on your report?
It depends. This is from my experience from when I worked selling motorcycles and would open credit accounts with Household and Conseco (formerly Greentree). With Household, the information from the application was typed into the computer and sent via modem. The online session would stay up for three minutes, and most of the time you would get an instant response during this period. The computer would pull your credit and divinate the score. If you were below the decline cutoff (or had a BK) it was an automatic decline. If you were above the accept cutoff, you were accepted and issued a credit line based on your score. This was all completely automated with no human intervention. But in between the decline and accept cutoffs was a gray area. If your score fell in the gray area you would be automatically kicked out to human underwriters. These people work in Vegas. They actually worked very hard to get people approved. At this point I think they would consider the make and model of the vehicle the customer was purchasing. In one case an application was delayed for a long period, and I found out it had to be signed off by a vice-president for approval. He signed. Conseco was a little different. The customer completed application was faxed to them and the accept/decline was faxed back. They took a little longer, and I think a human reviewed every application. Conseco was much more interested in the particular make and model of the vehicle. One of their reps revealed to me that they had statistics which showed different levels of loan risk depending upon the make and model of the motorcycle. When I asked her where Yamaha (that I was selling) fell on the loan risk scale, she just smiled primly.
