How Petal is solving the new to credit problem

Churchill Leonard
5 min readMar 16, 2020

--

Getting a credit card to foot bills is quite an easy process.

First off, you check your credit score to get a ballpark idea of where you fall. This way, you can make better projections regarding your approval expectations.

With your credit score in hand, you start shopping around for options you’re more likely to get approved for, looking out for interest rates, payment plans, and several other factors that determine how much you can get.

Once you have your bucket of options, you can see where you’re pre-approved, apply, and wait to hear back.

A fairly straightforward process that you can be through within as little as 3 days.

Except if you’re new to credit, that is.

While credit card businesses pride themselves on being open to customers from numerous financial statuses, there’s a particular class that always gets a hard pass whenever it’s time to get started building credit.

The New to Credit tribe.

Now, if you’re new to credit, you probably already get where we’re heading, but for clarity’s sake, we’ll elaborate.

Banks and credit card companies let you borrow because they expect you to pay back. And when you do pay back, they assign you a score that determines if and how much you can borrow from them, so you can get the money you need with minimal risk to them.

But what happens when you’re not even given the chance to try your hand at managing credit?

This is a problem millions of people across America face when they’re fresh into the world of money and credit: a slim credit record that makes it difficult and almost impossible to get assigned a fair credit score. Worse, you could have been hard at work building up your credit history to standard, but inaccurate records and few issues could restrict you from critically needed funds, both for your personal use and your business.

Since the entire credit system is built on advancing more and more cash to people who have a history of paying back the money they’ve been credited with, how do you even get to try your hand at building a credit history when no one trusts you enough to give you that very first try.

Luckily, Petal, a fintech company is changing all that.

Petal is solving the new to credit problem by offering people who’re getting started building credit with their first try.

Petal offers a considerate credit solution that gets you started building credit from scratch even without a credit history. Everybody has to start somewhere and we all had someone take a chance on us to get us started. Petal brands itself as the card for people sick of dealing with credit card companies and empowers you to get started stacking your financial future.

I took a look at Petal’s offerings and it’s not hard seeing they’re serious about shaking up the crazily restrictive world of credit. Petal actually focuses on a win-win system that works for you first, and them—not the other way round. A few of Petal’s game-changing features that’ll shake up the industry include:

Considerate Credit Offers

Petal works off a combination of data and a considerate, commonsense rating system that looks through your credit history to see how much you can get access to. This way, if you’re new to building a credit history, Petal offers increased chances of approval so you can begin building credit from a stable foundation.

Zero fees.

It’s quite understandable why we use credit cards: we don’t have nearly enough money for lots of the stuff we need. Now, imagine if you had to pay stiff charges for the opportunity of being offered credit and you’ll realize just how much it doesn’t make sense. Unlike most credit card companies, Petal realizes every bit of money matters and you don’t get charged any fees for choosing Petal. Instead, Petal helps you focus on helping you build healthy financial habits that’ll build your future.

Excellent User Experience

Your credit experience with Petal comes with an intuitive user experience on the Petal app where you can manage your credit, keep tabs on your balance, keep an eye on your credit score, budget your monthly spend, and earn higher cashback for paying off your balance on time and shopping with approved retailers. With Petal, every step of your journey building credit is designed to be richly fulfilling so you can focus more on what matters vs. stressing out over your next repayment.

And a lot more…

Petal actually does sound a little too good to be true, but upon a little digging through, you discover that this is a company that puts their money where their mouth is. With up to 1.5% cashback on every purchase, zero late payments, a nice $10,000 limit + support for over 14,000 financial institutions, all built on a Fort Knox level security stack that keeps your money yours, Petal makes other A-class credit card providers look like a joke when placed side by side.

Petal’s designed to give users that first chance at reasonable credit that doesn’t suck, to help you stay focused on what matters vs. tireless overspending that keeps you scrambling to cover payments before they take a chunk out of your credit score.

All in all, Petal takes a proactive look at personal financial responsibility, helping you plan for your future, with a focus on offering opportunity to everyone. Because no one’s future should be postponed or outright denied because of a credit history.

Wanna hit all those #Cashflow goals you set for 2020?

Try out Petal right away.

--

--

Churchill Leonard

Freelance writer and content marketer for B2B SaaS and fintech startups. Amateur economist. Geek.