Experian wants you to carry its debit card around. Be wary

In what universe would anyone want to whip out a debit card with the name of a credit bureau on it?

For the past year, Experian has been testing this question with its Smart Money debit card, which it advertises as a way to “build credit without the debt.” TransUnion has no such card, and neither does Equifax, which exposed the data of tens of millions of people to hackers in 2017.

These are the three credit bureaus that play judge and jury with your financial life. Their reports are the foundation for the all-powerful scoring system that fulfills or kills your dream of a decent mortgage or car loan. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau regularly calls out their flaws.

Experian, however, is loud and proud. In one ad, football player Travis Kelce wears a generic jersey and peddles the new card, calling it “cool.”

The company is not a bank, so it has a partner for the debit card and the direct deposit, ATM access and other checking-account features that come with it. It has no monthly fee, and you can sometimes get your paycheck a couple of days in advance of when it would otherwise post, but plenty of other companies offer features like this.

Because this is a credit bureau selling what looks like an old-fashioned checking account, the most logical question a consumer might ask would be: If I use this card, do I get a boost on my Experian credit report that I wouldn’t get in any other way?

To answer that question, you need to understand a bit about the other Experian service that comes with the Smart Money debit card. It’s called Experian Boost, and my colleague Ann Carrns wrote about it in 2018 when the company was introducing it.

You don’t need Experian’s debit card to enroll in Boost. The Boost service can work with other debit cards, too.

The Experian card doesn’t, on its own, give you any special credit-boosting privileges. It exists, it seems, mostly to boost Boost. Or as an Experian spokesperson, Sandra Bernardo, put it in an email after an executive wouldn’t speak on the phone: “We believe that financial inclusion is imperative. Our aim is to help consumers enter the credit ecosystem without taking on debt and empower them throughout their journey so they can reach their financial goals.”

Like the debit card, Boost is free, and this is a good moment to sing a little ditty that should be part of any consumer’s repertoire: If a certain something’s free, then the product may be me.

How could that be? Boost works by helping people with a limited credit record (or a lousy one) potentially improve it. Upon enrollment, Experian scours your debit-card transactions in search of regular payments of certain bills that may help prove to future lenders that you are trustworthy.

Potentially. Certain. May. These are wiggle words, ones that Experian echoes on its website. How often does Boost actually offer improvements?

To its credit, Experian discloses detailed odds of Boost’s having an effect. For every 100 people who enroll, 41 won’t see any lift in a particular FICO credit score, which Experian uses to track Boost’s influence. Of the 59 who do, the mean increase is 13 points. (Boost reports only good behavior, so it can’t hurt your credit score.)

That isn’t much for a score that goes up to 850. Banks often have “bands” of credit — poor, good, excellent — that they use to set interest rates or reject people altogether. In Experian’s sample bands, just 8% of Boost users who did see a lift in scores advanced from one band to another. That improvement could make a difference for people seeking a loan, even if it’s only a small portion of users.

This data comes from a recent Experian environmental, social and governance, or ESG, standards report. Just to drive the point home, Experian wants us all to consider Boost a social good. And according to the company, of the Boost users who start in its “poor” credit band and see their scores rise, the service helps 21% move out of purgatory.

Still, Boost may be useless for many of the 15 million people who have enrolled so far seeking improved credit. Since this is related to ESG as far as Experian is concerned, Boost must certainly be harmless, right?

Here, we return to our maxim, the one about you being the product when something is free. In a recent presentation to investors that had little to do with ESG, Experian described Boost on a slide titled “Expanding Data Sources for a 360º View of Consumers.” Boost, according to Experian, is “consumer-permissioned data.”

Experian sells data to lenders and others who are considering doing business with you. If you don’t have much of a credit history, lenders need to get to know you better to determine if you are a good candidate for a loan. Boost, in effect, can allow you to open your shades wider, so that lenders that are Experian’s customers can get that wraparound view.

Whether Boost is a social good or not depends on where you sit. If we want credit as quickly and cheaply as possible, somebody needs to keep track of everybody.

Experian helps with that and invites new people into its database. This is the same Experian, however, that I wrote about in 2009, when it was in all sorts of trouble for charging consumers who were trying to get the free credit reports that they are entitled to by law.

Things got so bad that the Federal Trade Commission felt compelled to produce its own commercials in an attempt to program against Experian’s messaging. So went the FTC’s jingle: “Other sites may turn your head; they say they’re free, don’t be misled. Once you’re in their tangled web, they’ll sell you something else instead.”

Now that is cool. But is Experian’s debit card? With all due respect to Kelce, it’s hard to offer such an unqualified endorsement.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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