Credit Karma is a free web-based credit and financial management service for US consumers.
Founded in 2008, it provides free credit scores, credit reports, and credit monitoring from
the national credit bureau TransUnion.
Credit Karma provides credit tools, such as the Credit Report Card, which summarizes a
consumer’s credit report into categories with an A-F letter grade; a Credit Score Simulator,
which simulates the effect of certain financial actions on credit scores; and daily credit
monitoring, which sends an email alert when something important changes in a consumer’s
TransUnion credit report.
In addition to free credit scores and reports, Credit Karma also offers financial account
monitoring through account aggregation service Yodlee.
This service allows consumers to track their banking, credit card, and loan transactions
and balances in Credit Karma’s interface.
Founder and investors Kenneth Lin, who previously worked with E-Loan
and Upromise, launched Credit Karma in February 2008.
The start-up was primarily funded by investors Chris Larson, CEO of Prosper, and Mark Lefanowicz,
former president of E-Loan.
In 2009, Ron Conway, Dave McClure, and QED Investors made additional investments in Credit
Karma.
In 2013, Credit Karma secured $30 million in Series B funding from Ribbit Capital and
Susquehanna Growth Equity.
In 2014, Credit Karma secured $85 million in Series C funding from Google Capital and
Tiger Global Management.
Credit Karma’s credit scores Credit Karma provides four credit scores from
TransUnion: the TransUnion New Account Score, the VantageScore, the TransUnion Auto Insurance
Risk Score and the TransUnion Home Insurance Risk Score.
The New Account score model ranges from 300 to 850, which is the same scale as the FICO
score.
In January 2011, Credit Karma began providing the VantageScore 2.0 and Auto Insurance Risk
Score.
In April 2013, Credit Karma began offering TransUnion’s Home Insurance Risk Score along
with the launch of financial account monitoring.
Consumers can update their credit scores on Credit Karma once a week.
Business model Credit Karma is free to consumers.
Revenue from advertisements offsets the costs of free credit score tracking and financial
monitoring.
News In August 2014, the Federal Trade Commission
approved a final order settling charges against Credit Karma for misrepresenting to the public
the security of their mobile apps and for failing to protect the transmission of their
customers’ sensitive personal information.
In the settlement, Credit Karma agreed to independent security evaluations of their
systems every other year for the next 20 years.
The FTC alleged in its complaint that Credit Karma’s mobile apps were launched with code
that disabled Secure Sockets Layer “SSL” validation.
The main allegations from the FTC included: that Credit Karma overrode the default SSL
certificate validation settings without adding back in other security measures to compensate
for the override, failed to appropriately test, audit, assess, its application, and
failed to appropriately supervise service providers’ security practices.
See also Credit scores
Credit Sesame Mint
Quizzle References
External links Official Site