Actual CPO, it appears that demo / loaners are already addressed in the photo
FYI - i applied for a savings account only a couple weeks ago. They definitely do a hard pull on your credit.
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Thanks for the additional data point. I think everyone should assume you will get a hard pull from PenFed at account opening.
There wasn’t a hard pull for my account.
No hard pull for me back in January.
No hard pull for me a few weeks ago. Rep said that applying online would be soft pull as opposed to over the phone.
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Wonder if it depends on how you answer the questions including one about foreign money transfers. They also ask whether you want to fill out your own info or have them pull it from their sources.
I just opened up my account with $5.00, and didn’t get hard pulled. I read the checking accounts require a minimum of $500 to avoid a monthly $10.00 fee. I also noticed their Money Market Savings advertised “no monthly fee.” However, I can’t find anything description of fees applying to Regular Savings. It’s no fee, correct?
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Right now I have $19.01 in my Regular Savings account. $0.01 of that is interest I’ve earned YTD (right now they’re paying 0.05% APY – get it while its hot!).
No fees. I do have $1 direct deposited per pay period to avoid inactivity.
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Correction – they hard pulled Equifax. Why a bank needs to hard pull to open a savings account is beyond me.
If you don’t have an existing relationship with the institution, they are almost obligated to do it as a necessary step - it’s a process known as KYC (know your customer). Very common in the financial services industry and yet not well known publicly.
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I’ve never seen this as a common practice. Most just pull chex systems and call it a day…
Back office operations, depends on your internal risk rating/profile, product and how well the institution knows you. Many other factors into it of course, but credit pull is just one. When you open an account, the institution may also source your data from third party aggregators.
Edit: google-search for KYC… small orgs obviously have more limited capabilities while the larger ones are almost required to have extensive due diligence processes.
I’ve opened a lot of bank accounts and never had a hard credit pull.
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Agree with you both. It’s just weird that they did it without really telling me they were. I’m sure it’s buried in some terms and conditions document, but even buying a house there’s a big warning on the screen “submit to credit check - hard pull.” That wasn’t the case with PenFed. I probably would have allowed it anyway, but the lack of transparency regarding the hard pull is concerning. Hopefully they make it up when I lease a Volvo and stack their 1,000 incentive! 
True - any type of credit check or decision based on credit would have needed a lot of clear documentation and approval from the applicant
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I just opened a savings account last week (@trism stories about their ability to screw up a free lunch were understated; total 
show), but I did have to unfreeze Equifax so they could do a soft-pull.
Much longer story: I applied in August, got an email verification when my docs were reviewed and approved, but couldn’t login. When I called in Sept they were like “lol who dis?” - they had all my verification documents but no application or account opened - an hour on the phone with a supervisor enlightened me to their technology challenges.
Very nice people, questionable processed, user-hostile antiquated technology. But no hard credit pull for my new savings account.
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Tried to use the rule of 72 to see how long it’d take to double the money and it spit out something about lifetime exceeded.
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Same with their credit card app. My recent college grad daughter just applied for their CC for gas perks and got rejected due to high balances in relationship to her income. WHAT?!?!?! Apparently, they considered all of the parents’ CC accounts where we’ve had her as an authorized user since she was a teen. And, BTW, we pay the balances each month in full. Never came up when she got approved for CC’s from national banks.
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Was it this card by any chance?
The cruel joke here is that 5x on gas is NOT 5% cash back. The points are NOT worth 1 cent each.
I ran several months’ worth of our historical spending against the rewards structure on this card. After factoring in the miserable cash redemption value for the points, the “5x” on gas and “3x” on groceries (and 1x on everything else) would have yielded just shy of 1% cash back. 
This is literally the worst rewards card in my collection. I keep it open because it’s an old account.
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