Thread by @patio11

Always tough to guess underwriting policies from outside the building but I think that increasingly good, integrated IT systems and faster decision loops is causing some banks to try to get cozier with some customers than previously.

One of the reasons the FICO/credit report system works is that banks want to know what your total exposure is and, historically, they wanted to avoid having it concentrated on them.

This limits damage from a strategic default in event of a "bust out" situation.

I just opened 3rd card with a particular US megabank which is very aggressively trying to grow credit portfolio, and they were happy to increase their aggregate exposure to me to $SILLY, where they were concerned about that a few years ago.

I assume that part of the calculus is "Well if we give you $20k on Card C that doesn't *really* commit us to an extra $20k of risk because if you were to saturate your limit on Card A then we'd dynamically lower limits on C before you were able to type in B's digits to borrow."

Really interesting anti-fraud loop, too: they sent me an email saying "Log into your online account, go to screen Foo, then read the letter." which said "Call this number."

Rep asked for reference number from the letter; that was basically it on the auth/auth for application.