Capital One recently rebranded their credit monitoring tool, making updates weekly instead of monthly and giving users access to their TransUnion VantageScore V3 credit score (previously a TransUnion New Account Model score). They have now made another change, their CreditWise tool is now available for free to non cardholders as well as cardholders.
The service is 100% free and no credit card is required. Basically Capital One are entering the free credit monitoring & score market, but there have been a flurry of entrants into this market as the cost of accessing this data has become cheaper. For example, all of the following companies provide credit score & monitoring data free of charge:
- Credit Karma – provides information based on your on Equifax & TransUnion credit report
- Credit.com – provides information based on your Experian credit report
- Credit Sesame – provides information based on your on TransUnion credit report
- WisePiggy – provides information based on your on TransUnion credit report
- Mint – provides information based on your on Equifax credit report
- WalletHub – provides information based on your on TransUnion credit report
- Quizzle –Â provides information based on your on TransUnion credit report
As you can see there is a lot of competition now in this market, Capital One are obviously they are hoping to leverage their brand to draw into customers. Once people sign up to CreditWise then they’ll be able to give them targeted offers for all of their financial products and services (much like the competition does, but they sell these ad spaces out to financial institutions like Capital One).
I don’t think Capital One’s offering is compelling enough to sign up for, Credit Karma gives you the exact same data and they also provide you with data from Equifax as well. I’ve always advocated a combination of Credit Karma & Credit.com to cover all three credit bureaus. If Capital One was offering a free FICO score, then this would be a different story but unfortunately they aren’t.
