Noddle

» see noddle.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Noddle is old British slang for your head, as in use your noddle, and naming a credit reporting service after it was the smartest decision the product ever made. A credit file is intimidating by construction. It is a document about you, assembled without your involvement, that decides whether you get a mortgage. Putting a soft purple wordmark on it made the thing sound like a tool instead of a verdict.

Callcredit launched it in December 2011, having invited ten thousand people to test it that June. The offer was a free credit report and a free score, for life, with no trial window quietly converting into a subscription. In Britain at the time that was close to unheard of. The statutory route to your own file was a paper request and a two-pound fee that almost nobody bothered with, and the commercial route was a thirty-day free trial that started charging monthly on day thirty-one.

The economics worked because Callcredit was itself one of the three UK credit reference agencies. It already held the data. Letting people see their own file cost it very little and bought it a direct relationship with four million consumers it could then show lending offers to.

~ the dossier ~

~ why free was the whole product ~

Four million registered users is a large number for something nobody enjoys looking at. People signed up because the alternative was paying a monthly fee to find out why a credit card had been declined, and because enough of them had been caught by the free-trial trick already to recognize an offer with no hook in it.

This particular ritual never traveled to where I was. Checking your own credit score as a routine consumer habit is a very Anglo-American thing, and in Turkey the equivalent record sits with the banks' own bureau and arrives as something you buy. I have never had a British credit file and would not have known what a good number on one looked like.

~ the sale ~

Credit Karma announced in November 2018 that it would buy Noddle from TransUnion, which had itself acquired Callcredit earlier that year. TechCrunch put the company at 35 employees and four million users. Credit Karma was not buying technology, it was buying a market: it already had the United States and Canada, it wanted Britain, and four million warm accounts were the fastest way in.

TransUnion completed the sale on 12 April 2019 and put out the release three days later. The wording is careful. UK consumers, it said, will continue to benefit from the free information monitoring and financial health solutions offered through Noddle. The brand came off over the following weeks.

~ the inheritance ~

The migration itself was undramatic. Noddle users were moved across to Credit Karma, kept their existing login details, and received an email pointing them at the new address. Which? covered the changeover under a headline that doubles as the obituary: free credit score company Noddle becomes Credit Karma.

noddle.co.uk still answers. It redirects to creditkarma.co.uk, where the page title now reads Credit Score & Credit Reports at Intuit Credit Karma, Intuit having bought Credit Karma in 2020. The service survived two more owners. The word did not.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »