X1 Card: I Predict It Goes Bankrupt Within 2 Years.

[PotO]

I bet X1 is another PisPay in the making.

 

I received an invite from them a few months ago and out of boredom decided to go for it.  Then I found out that the infinite piece of 💩 Plaid cannot link with HSBC so they are unable to verify my salary and I gave up.  Today they sent me an e-mail asking me to give it another try.  They still cannot link to HSBC, but were able to link to my CapOne checking where I get a small portion of my salary deposited.  

 

I went through the process and it came out with an approval for $10.5k.  Then it asked for a photo of my ID and a selfie.  Their system works like 💩 when using an iPad camera so I ultimately had to switch to using an iPhone.  After it verified my ID, it said I needed to unfreeze Experian.  I always keep my credit reports frozen.  I went to unlock Experian and came back to the X1 app and it wanted me to go through the Plaid bull💩 again.  This time it said I was approved for $44.5k.  WTF!

 

It then took me to their X1 app where the card details showed approved for $10.5k.  Ok.  Then when you exit the card details function it takes you to a continuation of the application process and a white box with a revolving circle, which inevitably means hurry up and wait, appears.  For two fooking hours.  During these two hours I tried to use the card for $25 at Verizon and it was declined.  I gave up and wrote them a super 💩ty e-mail and Twitter message.  The X1 peces of 💩 don't have live tech support and you have to either send them an e-mail or a text message. Comments I have seen on Twitter and Facebook say they answer in about a week.  

 

After about three hours the revolving circle stopped and there was a message that my card will be shipped tomorrow.  Everything seemed normal.  I tried using the card for $10 on Amazon and it worked.  It even let me make a $10 payment before the charge posted.  

 

I'll give them a while to get their act together, but I doubt they will.  Although I rarely nuke cards, this one is going on the chopping block within a very short period of time unless they start getting their act together.  

[hdporter]

X1 has all indicators of being operated by "Not Ready for Prime Time Players".

 

I get the feeling that they believe that their 3% cb reward structure is only sustainable if they keep account management costs "bare boned".  Thus, no phone support and no website.  Manage everything through the app.

 

Because I'm very much a "tech traditionalist", I'm also dubious that this model can go the distance without some serious revision.  On the other hand, maybe they have a keep insight into the post-boomer mindset and ultimately will stand out as the credit card app that "gets it".

 

Whatever the case, they need to check the stumble/fumble out of the starting gate shtick. 

 

------------

 

Re Blispay:  I'm not sure all what went on, but there's a strong indication that the problem is that they were under capitalized, rather than that there was something fatal about their operations.  Still, if their business was sound, you would think that someone would have been willing to swoop in to shore up capital for a hefty interest.  In any case, I don't see much in common between the two ventures.

 

 

2 hours ago, PotO said:

After about three hours the revolving circle stopped and there was a message that my card will be shipped tomorrow.  Everything seemed normal. 

 

"three hours" !!  I count myself a patient guy, but 15 minutes is enough for me to suspect their system has gone into a "death spiral" and reload the page ...

[MP80]

12 hours ago, PotO said:

This time it said I was approved for $44.5k.

Hey, Pot!

 

Is this the final starting limit or the $10.5K? If it's the latter, I'll not apply.

[PotO]

21 minutes ago, MP80 said:

Hey, Pot!

 

Is this the final starting limit or the $10.5K? If it's the latter, I'll not apply.

 

Unfortunately, the final limit was $10,500.  

 

I did learn something, though.  They base their starting limit on the calculations Plaid makes on the deposits shown into the account(s) you link.  Since the piece of shiat Plaid cannot link to HSBC, I could not show my full income.  I would have gotten a far higher limit.  Instead the limit they assigned was based on $1k weekly deposits to my Al Capone account.

 

I do believe there is a way to game the system for CLIs.  I will just dump my HSBC money into Al Capone on a bi-weekly basis and then after a few days move it back to HSBC.

 

** Special thanks to  @Knight for the Al Capone moniker for CapOne.  

[PotO]

9 hours ago, hdporter said:

X1 has all indicators of being operated by "Not Ready for Prime Time Players".

 

I get the feeling that they believe that their 3% cb reward structure is only sustainable if they keep account management costs "bare boned".  Thus, no phone support and no website.  Manage everything through the app.

 

Because I'm very much a "tech traditionalist", I'm also dubious that this model can go the distance without some serious revision.  On the other hand, maybe they have a keep insight into the post-boomer mindset and ultimately will stand out as the credit card app that "gets it".

 

Whatever the case, they need to check the stumble/fumble out of the starting gate shtick. 

 

------------

 

Re Blispay:  I'm not sure all what went on, but there's a strong indication that the problem is that they were under capitalized, rather than that there was something fatal about their operations.  Still, if their business was sound, you would think that someone would have been willing to swoop in to shore up capital for a hefty interest.  In any case, I don't see much in common between the two ventures.

 

 

 

"three hours" !!  I count myself a patient guy, but 15 minutes is enough for me to suspect their system has gone into a "death spiral" and reload the page ...

 

You are, of course, totally correct.  Three hours is unbelievable and I was ready to strangle them after just 3 minutes.  

 

I am also not sure why PisPay crashed.  I thought they were pretty good and they were doing nothing out of the ordinary.  Their 2% cash back rewards structure is used by Citi and PenFed and several others without problems now.

 

I am not sure if X1 is sustainable.  At least Apple Card has 24/7 text message support.  We will have to wait and see what happens.

[hdporter]

6 minutes ago, PotO said:

 

Unfortunately, the final limit was $10,500.  

 

I did learn something, though.  They base their starting limit on the calculations Plaid makes on the deposits shown into the account(s) you link.  Since the piece of shiat Plaid cannot link to HSBC, I could not show my full income.  I would have gotten a far higher limit.  Instead the limit they assigned was based on $1k weekly deposits to my Al Capone account.

 

 

Our primary transaction account is a relatively small credit union and Plaid couldn't link.  The alternative was to submit a downloaded statement.  I did this and Bev was assigned $33.5k.

[PotO]

Update on the X1 experience:

 

I sent my customary scathing e-mail and covered their half dozen major screw ups.  I got a nice reply from them when I woke up this morning and I have changed my X1 rating from FUBAR to cautiously optimistic.

 

They addressed each of my concerns and offered to refund the fee for FedEx shipping.  They stated that although HSBC is not supported by Plaid during the initial application process, I can link the account now after approval and they will use it to consider CLIs.  They promised to fix the issue with photo verification using iPad.  And two BIG advantages:

 

1.  Unlike PenFed, Navy and a few others, X1 doesn't mind when I log in from the country of stinky beancurd, fried cat fillet and bat soup; and

2.  You can make a payment to your X1 card using their app at any time even though you have a $0 balance.  I really like that!

[PotO]

1 minute ago, hdporter said:

 

Our primary transaction account is a relatively small credit union and Plaid couldn't link.  The alternative was to submit a downloaded statement.  I did this and Bev was assigned $33.5k.

 

I should have done the same, but since CapOne linked I decided to go through with the application.

 

Also, if seems like they only do a soft pull.  Is that true?

[brainchasm]

I didn't have any of your issues.  Luck of the draw I suppose.

 

I got $34k.  I use it as a daily driver if I don't have a better rewards card available.

 

[PotO]

8 hours ago, brainchasm said:

I didn't have any of your issues.  Luck of the draw I suppose.

 

I got $34k.  I use it as a daily driver if I don't have a better rewards card available.

 

 

My application would have gone much smoother had they not used shiatty Plaid.  Plaid cannot connect with every bank. As it is, I could only use my CapOne account and that only sees about 4% of my income. 

 

They did place 2 soft INQs at the time of approval.  After I completed the ID verification, they asked me to unfreeze EX, which I did.  The next day, seeing no hard INQ, I re-froze EX.  Two days later I got a message from EX that just several minutes prior a hard INQ from X1 was rejected as I had EX frozen.  I contacted X1 and they said everything is fine and no need to unfreeze EX.  

 

If not for the fact that their e-mail customer service staff seems very nice and the card seems to work, I would classify X1 as the proverbial monkey humping a football.  

[PotO]

Did anybody who applied get a hard INQ?????

[ImBack]

I opened an account uneventful. Looks like a hard pull on Experian. $33K limit. 

[PotO]

14 minutes ago, ImBack said:

I opened an account uneventful. Looks like a hard pull on Experian. $33K limit. 

 

Nice!

 

I got away with only a soft.  Because couldn't link HSBC, I only got $11k.  

[ImBack]

Wondering why @PotO says X1 is such a 💩?

[PotO]

18 minutes ago, ImBack said:

Wondering why @PotO says X1 is such a 💩?

 

Fair question.  There are two versions here depending on how interested anybody is to understand why.

 

1.  TL/DR Version:  Because it IS pure 💩,

 

2.  Expanded Version:  I was suckered into believing the hype a while back and after 1/2 a year or so I got an invitation to apply.  I applied and found out that you have to jump through the online ID verification 💩 with a selfie and your ID.  Ok, so that isn't that bad.  Then you have to allow them to use an even 💩tier service called Plaid to verify your income.  First of all, I do not like giving access to my bank accounts, especially on a prolonged basis, to some piece of 💩 external source that could be hacked any day now.  In the end I decided to go with the mandatory Plaid connection and low & behold, not every bank allows Plaid to access their system.  My main salary bank, HSBC, does not allow Plaid to access the HSBC system at all.  Ever.  Capital One does allow Plaid to connect, but I only put about 20% of my income into Al Capone.  Thus X1 approved me for one of the 💩tiest credit limits ever -- $11k.  And since credit limit increases depend on keeping your account linked via Plaid and since HSBC will never allow Plaid to connect, it's unlikely I will ever see a CLI.

 

Then there is the actual X1 card incompetent staff itself.  You can never -- yes, never -- get immediate support like you can with virtually every other bank on this planet.  You can only get support by either sending them a text message or an e-mail and then waiting a day or so for a reply.  

 

And then there's more of X1 card staff incompetence in how they designed the account payment system.  The only -- yes, only -- way to pay on your card account is by using the X1 app and initiating an ACH pull.  ACH pulls are notoriously slow compared to an ACH push or a BillPay.  With an ACH push or BillPay, the payment would hit my X1 account and clear in a maximum of two working days.  With the X1 system ACH pull, it takes 7 - 9 fooking days for a payment to clear!  that's at least one fooking week!  This is all in spite of the fact that the day after you make the payment I see the funds already taken from my payment account.  But, hey, no need for concern since they update your available credit to reflect the payment on the day after you make the payment, right?  Wrong!  Totally fooking wrong!!!

 

Not only is X1 staff totally incompetent, they are congenital liars as well.  Look at the top of your X1 app.  At the very top there are three sets of numbers.  One is your credit limit, the second your account balance and the third your available credit.  These rubrics should be self-explanatory, but for the learning disabled let's look at them closely.  Let's say your credit limit is $5,000.  With no pending or cleared transactions, your balance is $0 and your available credit is $5,000.  Simple enough, right?  So let's complicate it a bit.  Say you make a $4,000 purchase that generally takes a day or two to post.  The pending transactions are not reflected in your balance until they post.  Simple enough.  That's what all major card issuers do.  Even while a transaction is pending, though, your available credit drops to $1,000.  Also standard practice.

 

Where X1 defrauds you is when you make a payment.  Knowing that you will need to make another purchase that exceeds your available credit, you make a payment -- a payment that will take at least a week to clear.  The day after you make that $4,000 payment, X1 updates your available credit so now it shows $5,000 again.  This is before the payment actually clears according to their 1-week clearing timeline.  Now, there's nothing wrong with that because AmEx also updates my available credit immediately after I make a payment.  So do several other banks I have cards with.  Now, when you try to use that available credit, X1 will promptly F you ITA.  They will immediately freeze your account even though you should have at least $1,000 available credit and make you wait the week or longer for your payments to fully clear.  At the same time, they will prohibit you from cashing in your points.  

 

Oh, and as an extra added bonus, there is a Reddit thread about a guy who complained about some simple problem and out of the blue X1 closed his account in revenge.

 

The good news is that X1, like other fintech 💩hole banking companies, will be bankrupt within a year or three.  

 

 

 

 

[TunisianKnights]

Has anyone noticed ending account balances or beginning account balances that don't make sense? For example, we pay our balance in full every month, but they don't seem to always apply to full amount we paid, and somehow we have a several thousand starting balance at the beginning of the next month... throughout the month all of our transactions make sense, but they add the starting balance (which they never show how they got) and we end up with an final balance that seems much too high. This has happened several times now. We pointed it out, and each time they say "Whoops, your payment was just still processing (2-3 weeks later) so it wasn't credited yet to your account balance and that's why it's too high.. seems very fishy. This month alone, we caught and had to ask them to fix an incorrect additional $9,000 they said we owed them!?! Which makes us wonder if this is happening to other people. Something about this company has felt off from the start, and I have never felt this way about any other credit card company I have used. So I have purposefully been keeping an eagle eye on our account statements with them, and I have reached a point where I am pretty sure they are committing financial fraud.

[hanserya]

I've had the card from the day that they launched their Android app. Pretty sure I went with the soft pull option where they only considered my income and the still approved me for a $25k limit. I've never had any problems whatsoever and I've never had an occasion where I felt that I even needed to speak to anyone.

 

Their app makes everything self-service. I've since added my wife and oldest son to the account. X1 handles credit reporting for both of them even though my son is only 15. The parental and spending control are phenomenal tools for teaching him financial responsibility without giving himself enough rope to hang himself with. The credit reporting for my wife is also awesome considering she's a stay-at-home mom. It's sets my kid up for a solid start to adulthood and helps protect my wife should anything ever happen to me. The $40 annual fee for my kid's card is well worth it all things considered - even moreso in that I was completely enabled to set it all up on my own through the app.

 

My wife in particular absolutely loves the rewards structure. She's a couponer and loves to feel like she's getting the best deal possible. Her personality fits perfectly with the need to remain abreast of the current boosts that X1 is offering at any point in time.

 

I'm sorry that y'all had some issues getting yourself up and running, but I'm more sorry to hear that some of you are still banking at HSBC to be completely honest 🤢

[MP80]

I'm not interested in a credit card with a $500 cash limit and annual fees ranging from $0 to $75.

 

PotO's prophecy accurately predicted that the X1 card would likely be dead before it was acquired by Robinhood. It seems to be a problem for all fintech banking companies are alike, a short duration of existence. BlockFi (My $15K line of credit down the drain in less than a year), BlisPay, Aspiration, and X1 are now succeeded by Robinhood.
 

 

Edited November 3, 2023 by MP80

[Burgerwars]

2 hours ago, MP80 said:

I'm not interested in a credit card with a $500 cash limit and annual fees ranging from $0 to $75.

 

PotO's prophecy accurately predicted that the X1 card would likely be dead before it was acquired by Robinhood. It seems to be a problem for all fintech banking companies are alike, a short duration of existence. BlockFi (My $15K line of credit down the drain in less than a year), BlisPay, Aspiration, and X1 are now succeeded by Robinhood.
 

 

 

I wonder how the Robinhood X1 acquisition will turn out (no X1 card in my collection as of yet). It's not like your average Robinhood customer is ultra-rich, although they might think they are. I've read the median Robinhood account is worth something like $250, with 43% of Robinhood customers having sub 650 FICOs (I don't know how they figured that out).  I do have a Robinhood account along with their debit card/spending account. It's my compulsive new account behavior on why I opened it. I have a small amount of stuff in the account. I'm one of the big-ballers when it comes to Robinhood stock (HOOD). I bought one share that sits in the account. I've been taking a beating on it. I bought at about $30. Now it's $9.48. Oh well.  Hopefully I won't be sleeping on the streets because of that.  

[MP80]

13 hours ago, Burgerwars said:

I wonder how the Robinhood X1 acquisition will turn out (no X1 card in my collection as of yet). It's not like your average Robinhood customer is ultra-rich, although they might think they are. I've read the median Robinhood account is worth something like $250, with 43% of Robinhood customers having sub 650 FICOs.

I see almost no mention of the Robinhood brand online, in news articles, and in ads. It's not a household name that you're familiar with, maybe it's more recognized in the individual cities and states where they are located. I think of it as anything other than just a podunk entity of less importance.

 

13 hours ago, Burgerwars said:

I'm one of the big-ballers when it comes to Robinhood stock (HOOD). I bought one share that sits in the account.

Are you like Mr. Buffett,  who buys a favorite stock and lets it rise for 30 years or more, like the Coca-Cola brand? His Berkshire conglomerates own 12.8% (~$300 billion dollars) of Bank of America's net worth, which now looks like a scary number to take seriously, not counting other well-known financial groups.

[cashnocredit]

On 8/1/2022 at 7:46 AM, PotO said:

I bet X1 is another PisPay in the making.

 

I received an invite from them a few months ago and out of boredom decided to go for it.  Then I found out that the infinite piece of 💩 Plaid cannot link with HSBC so they are unable to verify my salary and I gave up.  Today they sent me an e-mail asking me to give it another try.  They still cannot link to HSBC, but were able to link to my CapOne checking where I get a small portion of my salary deposited.  

 

I went through the process and it came out with an approval for $10.5k.  Then it asked for a photo of my ID and a selfie.  Their system works like 💩 when using an iPad camera so I ultimately had to switch to using an iPhone.  After it verified my ID, it said I needed to unfreeze Experian.  I always keep my credit reports frozen.  I went to unlock Experian and came back to the X1 app and it wanted me to go through the Plaid bull💩 again.  This time it said I was approved for $44.5k.  WTF!

 

It then took me to their X1 app where the card details showed approved for $10.5k.  Ok.  Then when you exit the card details function it takes you to a continuation of the application process and a white box with a revolving circle, which inevitably means hurry up and wait, appears.  For two fooking hours.  During these two hours I tried to use the card for $25 at Verizon and it was declined.  I gave up and wrote them a super 💩ty e-mail and Twitter message.  The X1 peces of 💩 don't have live tech support and you have to either send them an e-mail or a text message. Comments I have seen on Twitter and Facebook say they answer in about a week.  

 

After about three hours the revolving circle stopped and there was a message that my card will be shipped tomorrow.  Everything seemed normal.  I tried using the card for $10 on Amazon and it worked.  It even let me make a $10 payment before the charge posted.  

 

I'll give them a while to get their act together, but I doubt they will.  Although I rarely nuke cards, this one is going on the chopping block within a very short period of time unless they start getting their act together.  

You have more patience, or maybe stubbornness, than me.

[hdporter]

5 hours ago, cashnocredit said:

You have more patience, or maybe stubbornness, than me.

 

What you may lack in patience or stubbornness, you clearly make up for in tenaciousness ... (you've replied to a 15 mo old post  🙂)

[MP80]

Recent newcomer has revitalized the Necron thread.

 

The X1 card publicity was in a defunct transition mode we just rendered it demised.