Sources of your name Consumers often wonder how credit card issuers get their names and how much the lenders know about them. Card companies get prospective customers from many sources, but most commonly, they start with big blocks of names from the nation's three large credit-reporting firms. Virtually all lenders report and update customers' financial transactions, such as payments on loans, to those firms. The credit-reporting agencies generally do not collect income information. Card issuers have the computer-age tools to get a wide array of information about customers, say analysts, but some don't bother to get enough.
Banks can protect themselves on the front end.