Bypassed 5/24 Through Paper Application – 100k CIP

For a while now I have wanted to get my hands on the Chase Ink Preferred (CIP) but I am way past 4/24. Since in-branch pre-approvals bypass the 5/24 rule, I had visited a Chase branch and asked a banker to check if I was pre-approved for a business card. The banker said I was pre-approved for CIP. I did not apply for CIP then, instead I had the banker schedule me an appointment with a Business Relationship Manager (BRM). [At the time of writing this article] An application through BRM gets one a signup bonus of whooping 100,000 Ultimate Rewards (UR).

Fast forward few days and I am across a BRM who’s submitting my 100k CIP application. Now fast forward few minutes later and I hear the “7-10 days” status over the phone. While this message does not guarantee rejection of an application anymore, still the situation did not look good. Then a few days later and I received a letter in the mail stating one and only one reason for why my application was declined – “too many credit cards opened in the last two years associated with you”. The said statement is the formal language for the infamous 5/24 rule.

So why didn’t my pre-approval work? It turns out that true pre-approval will generate a fixed APR and mine clearly had a variable APR. In order to see APR the banker has to start an application on your behalf and one typically only gets to see the APR around the time of signing the printed document. At this point if you see a variable APR and if you’re past 4/24 then there is no point in going any further and wasting a hard pull.

Anyway, I wasn’t going to stop there because I knew of yet another way to bypass 5/24. I knew that paper application submitted by BRM (when done correctly) always bypassed 5/24 and as such I proceeded to setup yet another appointment with the BRM. A small side note – BRM typically manage million dollar clients are rather busy folks. It is normal for an individual BRM to cover 10-15 branches and there are only few dozens of them in a big cities.

The paper application took about 5-7 minutes with us making small talk about points and miles. I was told that he would try to have my application expedited. The very next day I got a notification on my phone saying I had a hard pull on my Experian credit report. I immediately logged into Chase business website and saw that I was approved for CIP. It is normal for this process to usually take 2-3 weeks but I suppose a BRM can push to get the process expedited.