by SurveillanceBalloon
I recently read this article written by a former Capital One product manager, and thought this subreddit might find it interesting:
newrepublic.com/article/155212/worked-capital-one-five-years-justified-piling-debt-poor-customers
It’s a pretty quick read, but has a few interesting anecdotes and explanations of things like Cap1’s proactive increase strategy with the goal of getting users to carry balances and pay APRs.
Here’s an interesting excerpt; The whole article is worth a read though.
Sadly, this latter view was not completely unreasonable. As Scott Schuh and Scott Fulford have shown in a paper for the Federal Reserve of Boston, people who get credit limit increases tend to keep their “utilization” constant. In other words: If a person is carrying a $1,500 balance when they have a $3,000 credit limit, you’d expect them to start carrying a $4,000 balance if the limit is raised to $8,000. If most people use the full credit-limit increases they are offered, the thinking goes, that must mean that most people want to borrow more money. If you lend them more money, you are “meeting customers’ needs.”
Because the borrower’s pain was not at the forefront for analysts, lingo like “pBad” (the percentage of people who can’t repay their loans), “second-order risk” (when customers who would have been able to repay a small loan default because they borrowed more than they could handle), “flow rates” (the percentage of people who will miss the next payment), “HBRs” (high-balance revolvers, or people who have a lot of debt) is not analogous to a military planner referring to “collateral damage” to talk about dead civilians. It is far more abstract.
Capital One’s culture of experimentation also acted as a kind of buffer. Fast Company has reported that Capital One runs 80,000 experiments per year. As Christopher Worley and Edward Lawler III explain in the journal Organizational Dynamics, a bank like Capital One can randomly assign differing interest rates, payment options, or rewards to various customers and see which combinations are most profitable for any given segment of people. It’s not so different from how a pharmaceutical company might use a randomized control trial to test whether a new drug is effective, except that the results of the bank’s experiment will never get published, and instead of curing diseases, the bank is trying to extract more money from each customer. The use of experiments is itself an act of psychological distancing; it allows the analysts controlling the experiment to resolutely apply its findings as a profit-maximizing mandate without giving the strategy a name such as, oh, “predatory lending.”