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, © 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.