Think you’ve been declined for a Bank of America card? Maybe you haven’t.

Recently, I had a strange experience while applying for a Bank of America credit card, so I thought that I’d share what happened in case it’s of help to anyone else who finds themself in a similar position.

The background

I’m in the process of moving away from the British Airways Club and earning elite status with Finnair Plus, but for reasons that I’ll go into in a separate article, I’ve recently started thinking that going forward, Alaska Airlines may turn out to be the airline which offers me the cheapest and easiest path to OneWorld Emerald status.

That thought meant that suddenly, the Alaska Airlines credit cards became considerably more interesting and as I’m currently spending a lot of my time outside of the United States, the Atmos Rewards Summit Visa Infinite credit card (which earns 3 miles/dollar on all foreign transactions) was the one that got my attention.

The application

I have absolutely no history whatsoever with Bank of America (I’ve never had an account with BoA and I’ve never held one of the bank’s credit cards) and a few internet searches told me that Bank of America can sometimes be tricky to deal with if it has no record of your existence.

I also found out that, anecdotally, Bank of America applications made from outside the United States are sometimes looked upon unfavorably and that applications made while using a VPN have also been known to run into problems.

Because I didn’t want to put any unnecessary obstacles in my own way, I waited until I was back on the West Coast before I submitted my application for the Summit card, but despite having a credit score north of 825 and very few recent credit applications on my file, I still had a bad feeling about how things were going to play out.

As it happens, I was right to be pessimistic.

The application screen paused while the algorithm did its work and then, a few seconds later, came the rejection.

The message on the screen seemed to be clear and the sentence starting with the words ” because we declined your application …” would appear to suggest that it wasn’t a case of “we’re unable to approve your application right now, but …” and just a flat out rejection.

That was disappointing.

What happened next

While I wasn’t overly surprised that Bank of America rejected my application (the internet is littered with stories of people with excellent credit scores and clean credit files being told to go away by the bank), but I still needed a bit of closure and I didn’t want to have to wait for the explanation letter that the rejection message told me was on its way.

So I called the Bank of America reconsideration line and after giving the phone agent a few of my details (there was no reference that I could provide), she found my application and proceed to say something that I wasn’t expecting.

“Oh, your application hasn’t been rejected, we just need some more information from you before we can proceed” (or words to that effect).

The agent couldn’t tell me what the necessary information was, but she promised that I’d be getting a letter in the mail explaining all.

Given that the message I saw on the screen seemed pretty unequivocal, I had my doubts about what the Bank of America letter was going to say, and when it arrived a few days later, I was still partly convinced that it was just going to be a standard rejection letter.

As it turned out, I was wrong to be pessimistic this time. The letter wasn’t a rejection letter. Instead, as promised by the phone agent, it really was a letter asking for more information.

Specifically, the bank says that it wants to confirm my social security number and it wants proof of income.

This is odd. What kind of banking system tells you very clearly that you’ve been rejected for a product when you haven’t really been rejected at all?

What now?

I have no idea why BoA needs to verify my Social Security number (isn’t that what a credit file is for?) but I have no issue providing the bank with the authorisation form it requested, so that’s one request taken care of.

I’m still considering the second request. I don’t get pay stubs, so that means that I’ll have to release my latest tax return to the bank if I want to move forward with this application and I haven’t yet had the time (or the inclination, if I’m being honest) to sit down and look through my tax return to see if there’s anything on there that I’d rather not share with the whole of the Bank of America credit card team.

I’m not desperate to get the Summit card, so if I’m in two minds about this after I’ve looked through my tax return, I’ll probably walk away.

Bottom line

There’s a quick and easy moral to the story here. If an application for the Atmos Rewards Summit Visa Infinite credit card can generate a rejection message on screen when a customer hasn’t really been rejected then this can probably happen on any Bank of America application.

I can’t be 100% sure that my call to the BoA reconsideration team didn’t play any part in how this worked out, but as I didn’t give the reconsideration agent any more information than I has already put in my application and as the reconsideration agent couldn’t tell me what further information was needed, I doubt my call made any difference.

Still, the next time the Bank of America algorithm rejects your application, don’t assume that the rejection is real. Put a call in to the reconsideration line or wait a couple of days and see what comes in the mail – it may not be the standard rejection letter that you’re expecting.