[Funder Mark]

What exactly is a soft credit pull?

[ridextreme]

What exactly is a soft credit pull?

When a bank sends you a pre-approved credit card, they obtained your credit score via a "soft pull" which means there is no inquiry. It's usually when someone pulls your credit without your permission for marketing purposes, or in conjunction with a background check for employment. There is also a soft pull when a consumer requests his own copy of a credit report such as credit karma. Your score will not go down a couple points for 6 months.

Just tell the customer to send everything in and you won't pull credit. Then tell him everything looks great, they want to approve you for 75K, and we will have the terms when they check your credit, would that be ok? If they say no, then they were never interested in moving forward in the first place. They're just window shopping.

[FundingCzar]

When a bank sends you a pre-approved credit card, they obtained your credit score via a "soft pull" which means there is no inquiry. It's usually when someone pulls your credit without your permission for marketing purposes, or in conjunction with a background check for employment. There is also a soft pull when a consumer requests his own copy of a credit report such as credit karma. Your score will not go down a couple points for 6 months.

Just tell the customer to send everything in and you won't pull credit. Then tell him everything looks great, they want to approve you for 75K, and we will have the terms when they check your credit, would that be ok? If they say no, then they were never interested in moving forward in the first place. They're just window shopping.

Spot on. There is so much misinformation out there. Yes there really are soft pulls, and many lenders use them now. If you are lending inhouse (not syndicating) you can even get on with Experian and do soft pulls yourself with a verbal authorization. There are 9 lenders I'm aware of that have switched over to exclusively soft pulls, and a handful that still do a hard pull but only just before funding.