What Affects Chances of Approval for Chase Ink Cards

What Affects Chances of Approval for Chase Ink Cards

In recent months we have seen talk of Chase tightening up approvals on Ink business cards. Personally I have come across datapoints from friends, in our Facebook group, and reddit.

It looks like something has changed since late September or maybe October, with more reports of denials in Ink applications. Now a survey conducted at r/churning is giving us some insight into what is affecting approvals and denials.

The dataset is quite small as nearly 300 participants, but it does point at some trends that are worth sharing. There’s also a set of respondents with applications in October and November only (about 150), which can further shed light on how things are currently working.

Let’s take a look at the data.

Sharp Decline in Approvals

As I mentioned above, there was a drastic change in approvals sometime in late September and early October. based on the stats from the survey, Ink applications in September or earlier had an approval rate of more than 70%.

Approval odds dropped sharply to just around 40%  for applications in October and November.

Number of Open Ink Cards at Time of Application

One of the main factors on odds of approval seems to be the number of Chase Ink Business credit cards that the applicant has at the time of application. There’s an indirect correlation between the two, with more Inks meaning a lesser chance of approval.

• 87% chance of approval when having 0 Ink cards open (14 DPs)
• 68% chance of approval when having 1 Ink card open (19 DPs)
• 57% chance of approval when having 2 Ink cards open (28 DPs)
• 18% chance of approval when having 3 Ink cards open (40 DPs)
• 5% chance of approval when having 4+ Ink cards open (18 DPs)

Besides the number of Inks you have open at the time of application, the number of Chase business cards opened in the last 24 months also has a slightly negative effect on approval odds.

Other Factors

First let’s look at what has a positive effect on approvals:

• Having a Chase business deposit account.
• Having opened a Chase personal card within the last 12 months.
• Applying as LLC instead of Sole-Proprietorship (small dataset of 9).

And this is what will negatively impact your chances of approval:

• Preemptively lowering credit limit on Chase business cards.
• Floating large balances on your Chase cards, possibly wen in 5-figure range.

Things that don’t make much of a difference include:

• Business revenue.
• How many years you have been in business.
• Spending on existing business credit cards.

Guru’s Wrap-up

The dataset is small but it does provide some useful insight on what affects chances of approval for Chase Ink credit cards. 

Have you recently applied? Let me know what he outcome was, or how does it match up to the survey results.