Citi just sent us one of those ominous plain envelopes from South Dakota, and (as I expected) inside is a Notice of Change in Terms and Right to Opt Out. They’d like to move this particular card from Prime + 4.99% to Prime + 8.99%.

The interesting thing to me is that we pay down our cards regularly and substantively, but (entrepreneurship being what it is these days) do maintain a balance. So I’m going to assume, based on the little I know about financial actuarial practice and business analytics, they’re reaching into their customer base and targeting those who they gauge willing to pay the increase and unwilling to bail out of the program entirely. The suckers, in other words.

I suspect, though I have no evidence on hand, that they may even be ameliorating rates for those in serious financial difficulties, since defaulting on credit cards (no matter what Congress does to change the bankruptcy laws) doesn’t give CitiFail any more money when you get right down to pocketbook accounting, or operating capital. And I bet they’re intentionally pissing off, or dropping outright, people (like my Mom) who are long-standing customers who pay down their balances immediately.

Intellectually, I don’t envy them. The times, and the crisis, are setting them against us. And if they make any wrong moves in the course of their collapse, they will not merely fail financially but end up being rendered in cartoons as big fat men with tophats and pocket watches. The only thing they can do (from their standpoint) is try to get what they can, trim the fat, and harvest the rest.

I find myself wondering if maybe, just possibly, there is an opportunity here to… well, the phrase coming to mind is “reverse the predator–prey relationship”. That’s pretty optimistic. “Level the playing field a bit” might be the more measured phrase. “Enable a collective defense” might be even better.

A transparency play.

I know that companies like Wesabe already aggregate (but keep private) credit account information. Not just how much money people owe, but I assume also information on Terms of Service and interest rates and suchlike.

What I’m imagining this afternoon is an anonymized but public aggregation of “everybody’s” terms of service, with a deep-ranging analytic system wrapped around it. How many people in your county have got better Terms? How many card contract structures are there, actually? What can we infer about Card Company X’s actuarial ruleset from the data on 100000 people’s contracts? What can those people do, looking at one another’s contracts, to identify opportunities to improve the “product” they are offered?

For example, when I called Inisha at Citi just now to bitch about these changes, she was (a) unable to tell me my Card Membership Date, (b) able to tell me that my Terms of Service cannot be seen online at all, anywhere, (c) able to put me on hold and propose a compromise interest rate somewhere closer to my original, without obviously working up a sweat. The implication to me is that this amounts to intentional obfuscation and hiding of crucial information, coupled with a big set of simple contingent reactions to protest. I have to assume that Citi keeps it hard to find anything out about the complex state of one’s terms specifically so that their representatives can offer a pig-in-a-poke incomparable alternative when challenged.

So I’d copy over my contract information somewhere, and even be willing to reveal limited balance data, if I was confident of its anonymity and knew that it was useful to reveal patterns in Citi’s (and others’) business practices and sales offer strategy.

I bet some other folks might be willing to do that too.