Fed Makes Credit Card Agreements Available Online
As one of the provisions of the Credit CARD Act, credit card issuers are now required to post their account agreements online and to supply them to the Federal Reserve. This week, the Fed used this information to debut a searchable online database of credit card agreements at www.federalreserve.gov/creditcardagreements/.
More than 300 card agreements are represented on the site, as all issuers who have more than 10,000 accounts are required to submit this information and update it quarterly. Each agreement contains general credit terms and conditions, along with fee and pricing information. If you need to find your agreement, the database allows searches by issuing bank, which you can usually find on the back of your credit card or your monthly statement.
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That database is much less useful than I thought it would be. You can search by issuer and any text in the card agreement. But, if I want to find the agreement that goes along with the Chase Sapphire card there’s no easy way to do it, as the agreements don’t include card names. Chase has 28 agreements on file and none contains the word “Sapphire.”
Similarly, Citibank (South Dakota) has 48 card agreements. Even if I wanted to look through all of them, there’s no way I could tell which one went with a particular card that appears on their site (or in my wallet).
@Jim
Similar thoughts ran through my head as I was looking at the database, as there don’t appear to be any real standards in terms of what’s required. At the minimum, the name that a card is marketed under should be associated with the agreement, but that seems to be hit or miss (mostly miss). Hopefully the Fed will hear this type of feedback and ask issuers to incorporate that in the future.