The American Prospect, March 1, 2024, A Public Option For Credit Card Shopping
With that kind of discrepancy, you would think that bigger card issuers would lose market share to those who offer better terms. But that brings us to this week’s CFPB action against credit card comparison-shopping websites. Credit Karma, NerdWallet, LendingTree, Bankrate, and others all offer shopping tools that rate credit cards with different features. They are quite popular; industry research shows that around 20 percent of all credit card sign-ups are referred through these third-party websites.
What you have to dig to discover is that these sites are paid by the credit card companies to rate their products. CFPB’s research has shown that the order in which shopping website users see card offers is dictated by this spending. These are not really neutral, Consumer Reports–type sites, but advertising outposts, where how much a company pays dictates how high up their products are on the list, or whether they are listed as a “featured” option.
