Metro 2 Portfolio Types (Field 14)

Portfolio Type is the smallest field in the Base Segment and the one with the widest blast radius. A single character tells the bureaus what kind of obligation this is, and from that character they infer how to read almost everything else on the record: whether Credit Limit is meaningful, whether Scheduled Monthly Payment is expected, whether Terms Duration should be a number of months or an open-ended arrangement, whether the account belongs in a utilization calculation, and how the Payment History Profile should age. Get this one byte wrong and a technically valid file still describes an account that does not exist.

There are five values. C (Line of Credit) and R (Revolving) both revolve a balance against a limit. I (Installment) and M (Mortgage) both amortize a fixed amount over a fixed term, with M carved out because real-estate lending has its own segment (K3), its own regulatory reporting, and its own scoring treatment. O (Open) is the odd one out: the balance is due in full each cycle rather than carried, so there is no limit to divide by and no amortization schedule to run down.

The rule that catches most furnishers is that Portfolio Type has to agree with Account Type, and Account Type is far more granular. Account Type 18 (credit card) belongs to a revolving portfolio, 00 (auto loan) to an installment portfolio, 26 (conventional real-estate mortgage) to a mortgage portfolio, 89 (home-equity line of credit) to a line-of-credit portfolio, and 29 (rental agreement), 92 (utility) and 93 (child support) to an open portfolio. A record that pairs Account Type 18 with Portfolio Type I is internally contradictory even though both values are individually legal, and that pairing is what the portfolio-type-mismatch edit exists to catch.

The second rule that matters set-wide is that utilization is only computed where a limit is real. Bureaus derive utilization from Current Balance against Credit Limit for C and R, so a missing or zero limit on those types does not produce zero utilization, it produces an account the scoring models treat as having no limit at all and often fall back to Highest Credit for. I and M have no utilization at all; their equivalent signal is Current Balance against Original Loan Amount, which is a different calculation with a different meaning. O accounts have neither, which is why an Open account reported with a Credit Limit is usually a mis-typed revolving account.

One live question sits at the edge of this field. Pay-in-Four and other buy-now-pay-later products are point-of-sale installment products under Portfolio Type I, since each plan is a closed-end obligation repaid in a fixed number of equal payments. The friction is not the portfolio type, it is the cadence: a four-payment plan paid every two weeks finishes inside two reporting cycles, and Metro 2 assumes a monthly cycle. Where the in-repo source is silent on how a sub-monthly cadence should be expressed alongside a monthly Scheduled Monthly Payment figure, this library says so rather than inventing a rule.