Relevance

Data is chosen and collected with consumer borrowers in mind. Data fields are limited to metrics that inform decision-making and risk-mitigation, as well as contact information. Most of the raw data must be analyzed by Thick Credit to drive insights, except for simple fields such as name and purchases.

Collection

All data is continually collected from the Federal Reserve by human agents. The process can involve manually extracting data from PDFs and other untransferrable files.

Accuracy

Accuracy is reinforced by dual-authentication and continual updating of evolutionary figures, such as interest rates that may evolve over time.

Completeness

In some instances, cardholder agreements do not include standard metrics, or require an application to determine interest. In these cases, the agreements are excluded by default or sourced by call with the card issuer if critical to analysis.

Recency

The data is updated continually to include new data and new offers entering the market.

Cleaning

Cleaning includes the conversion of PDFs or other non-tabular files into spreadsheets for analysis.

Privacy

The dataset is hosted natively offline and on hard drives inaccessible via internet channels.

Validation

Outliers do not impact raw data, only analysis. We use a conservative framework that eliminates outliers with a material impact on analytical metrics helpful to consumers. There are no aggregation weaknesses in the dataset as of publishing. We adjust all calculations to present the most accurate reality to consumers.