Credit card offers are back — but at a price

The rise is striking because it includes offers to riskier borrowers who were shunned as recently as six months ago. But this time, in contrast to the boom years, when banks “preapproved’’ seemingly everyone, lenders are choosing their prospects more carefully and setting stricter terms to guard against another wave of losses.

For consumers, the resurgence of offers is an opportunity to repair damaged credit and regain the convenience of paying with plastic. But there is a catch: The new cards have higher interest rates and annual fees.

Lenders are “tiptoeing their way back into the higher-risk pool of customers,’’ said John Ulzheimer, an executive at SmartCredit.com.

Lenders are also looking beyond standard credit scores, on the theory that some people who might seem to be equal risks may in fact show differences in spending habits or other behavior — like registering on an online job site — that suggest variations in their ability to pay.

Consultants, trying to feed the demand for finer classifications, have coined new labels to describe such borrowers.

“Strategic defaulters’’ have credit scores that were damaged because they walked away from a home when its value dropped below what was owed on the mortgage. They made a bad bet on real estate but may otherwise be prudent risks because they make a good living.

“First-time defaulters’’ once had a strong credit record but ran into trouble during the recession, often after losing a job, not from taking on too much debt.

But “sloppy payers’’ pay only some bills on time, “abusers’’ are defiant, and “distressed borrowers’’ simply can’t pay.

The goal is to identify consumers whose credit scores are blemished but who still have the money to pay their bills.

Lenders desperately want to grow again, but have had $189 billion in credit card losses since 2007, according to Oliver Wyman Group, a financial consultancy. To stem losses, lenders halted card offers to all but the most affluent. At the same time, 8 million consumers stopped using credit cards, a sign of nationwide belt-tightening, according to TransUnion. Millions more who still have cards have been paying down their balances or using cash more often.

Credit cards once gave banking a quarter of its profits; today those profits have all but vanished. Now that the losses have stabilized, lenders have set out to revive their card businesses.

HSBC mailed more than 16 million card offers in the third quarter, Citigroup 14 million and Discover 10 million, all roughly tenfold increases over the same period last year, according to Synovate Mail Monitor, a market research firm. Capital One’s rate rose fiftyfold, to 22 million.

In all, lenders will send about 2.5 billion credit card offers by the end of the year, Synovate estimates, compared with more than 6 billion in 2005, the peak year.

The bulk of this year’s mailings are still going to affluent people, with just 17 percent going to borrowers with blemished credit. That compares with about 39 percent in 2007 and a low of 7 percent in late 2009.

Many of the new lower-end cards start with high interest rates and annual fees, because new federal rules limit the ability of lenders to change the terms after payments are missed. Capital One, for example, is offering low-end cards that carry interest rates of 18 percent or higher and annual fees of up to $50.

Citigroup is testing a credit card with training wheels, known as CitiMax. Borrowers must link their credit card account to a checking, savings, or brokerage account so Citi can withdraw money if a payment is missed. And Bank of America and Wells Fargo are steering more customers denied a traditional credit card toward “secured’’ cards that are backed by a deposit the owner is not permitted to touch.