Travis Kelce is everywhere right now. The Kansas City Chiefs tight end has gone from “guy who is very good at football” to “guy whose name I say more than my own” in the span of mere months. The Taylor Swift factor is obviously a big part of it — dating the world’s most famous pop star will get you into the limelight — but Kelce is a mini-media mogul in his own right. He hosts a popular podcast. He’s a spokesperson for getting vaccinated, buying insurance, and eating soup. And now, he would like to talk about everybody’s — credit scores.
Lately, my X, formerly Twitter, feed has been filled with a particular sponsored post from Experian, one of the three big credit bureaus in the US, that features a surprised-looking Kelce asking a pretty personal question: Do you know your FICO score? It’s the type of message that can briefly fill you with panic since credit scores can make or break your financial life. It’s also the type of message that, if you take a beat, has more to unpack. What does Travis Kelce know about personal finance? More importantly, why is a credit bureau, which ostensibly exists to help American Express decide whether to give someone a credit card, advertising directly to people at all?
Back in October, Experian announced it was launching a campaign with Kelce to “help consumers score a financial touchdown” by signing up for the credit bureau’s “Smart Money” checking account. Its ads featuring the Chiefs player have since flooded TV and social media. One of the main selling points of the Smart Money account is access to Experian Boost, a product that can help people increase their credit scores. Credit scores are calculated based on your track record of paying back loans, from the small, such as your monthly credit-card bill, to the massive, like a mortgage. How long you’ve been a borrower, how much you owe, and how often prospective new lenders are checking your credit are all taken into account. But a lot of regular transactions that could, in theory, prove your financial reliability are missed by the traditional process. So when you sign up for Boost, you allow Experian to scan your bank account for other regular payments — say, those to Netflix or the electric company — and lets you add them to your Experian credit file. Experian says Boost increases credit scores by an average of 13 points. When I tried it on my Citibank checking account, it increased my FICO score by 7. (You don’t have to have an account with Experian to use Boost, which is free.)
On its face, this seems pretty useful: Why not get credit for payments you’re already trying to make? But when you dig deeper, the offering is actually a little meh. The checking account and debit card are pretty vanilla, and Boost doesn’t guarantee a higher credit score. Even if you do get one, it’s not necessarily super meaningful. Plus, Experian is just one of the three big agencies, so Boost won’t affect scores from its competitors, TransUnion and Equifax. Also, FICO scores range from 300 to 850 — so a 7-point uptick isn’t suddenly going to open the door to a lot of new loans. In fact, it’s unclear whether lenders are taking this alternative data, meaning information not usually included in credit scoring, into account at all. The Boost-sourced data is cherry-picked — you get to decide to offer up when you pay on time, not when you pay late — and it’s incomplete. When you go in for a mortgage, the bank may simply not care whether you paid your Netflix bill on time.
“It is certainly better to improve one of the three reports than none, but if your lender doesn’t use Experian, then the help from Boost is largely irrelevant,” Matt Schulz, the chief credit analyst at LendingTree, said.
While the Kelce package is a mixed bag for the consumer, on Experian’s end, the math is pretty good. For one thing, experts told me, Experian likely gets a cut of the swipe fee on the debit cards — the charge merchants pay every time a customer uses their card. For larger banks with over $10 billion in assets, the amount that they can collect from swipe fees is capped at $0.21 per transaction, plus 0.05% of the transaction value. But because Experian is partnering with a small bank, it can circumvent the cap, allowing the company to collect even more revenue. That probably explains why there’s a $75,000 limit on the accounts, said Aaron Klein, a senior fellow in economics at the Brookings Institution and former Treasury official.
“It’s a national brand that people are familiar with, with a national spokesman, for a tiny bank that’s going to be able to generate two to almost four times the swipe fee of the big banks,” he said.
Swipe fees are nice, but the bigger get for Experian is probably the data, whether obtained by persuading people to sign up for a debit card, attach their bank account to Boost, or just hand over their email and create an account. It can then sell that data onward or use it to try to sell people other financial products, such as a consumer loan or a new credit card, for which Experian gets paid.
“They can both refer you to loans and perhaps sell you additional products, like credit monitoring,” Rajiv Bhatia, an equity-research analyst at Morningstar, said.
Experian has historically been the most direct-to-consumer-focused of the three bureaus — after its 2017 data breach, Equifax would like for you to forget it exists, and TransUnion does some DTC advertising but not as much. “Experian has always been the most aggressive,” Chi Chi Wu, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center who focuses on consumer credit, said. It’s gotten them into hot water with regulators in the past, including over marketing of not-so-free “free” credit reports and spamming consumers with marketing emails they couldn’t make stop.
When I reached out to Experian to talk about its consumer business, Boost, and Kelce, a spokesperson for the company said that while Experian was “widely known as a credit bureau,” it’s a “data and technology business using innovative technology to modernize an industry and provide real-time data to help consumers and businesses.” She added that more than 14 million consumers had used Boost and that working with “ambassadors” such as Kelce complemented Experian’s mission “in trying to reach a wide and diverse audience with information about the resources we offer.”
As a general rule, it’s not a great idea to listen to advertising from celebrities pitching financial products, including Kelce — or Swift, who does ads for Capital One. It’s not that anyone here is bad for taking ad dollars or that companies are nefarious for trying to reel consumers in, but there’s a fundamental information asymmetry at play here. As with many financial products, it’s helpful sometimes to just ask, “What’s in it for them?” Especially when it’s a credit bureau — perhaps a necessary evil in the economy but not really your best friend.
As for the Kelce-Boost package, it’s not going to ruin your life if you sign up, but you’re handing over data you might later come to regret providing, and you’ll wind up with more spammy emails in your inbox. Experian, not the consumer, is the real winner here.
“I am highly dubious that your FICO score will materially change as a result of this,” Klein said. “But America is filled with people with bad credit scores who want to improve, and probably a lot of them are football fans.”
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
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