Anyone disagree with anything?
1. Banks need permissible purpose to pull (soft). Practically, major FI do this all the time for determining pre-approved population, for identifying spend engagement or credit line increase opportunities and a myriad of other projects.
2. As a consumer, you can freeze, which means that even with a permissible purpose, they can't pull your report for any of these reasons. As a result, you're unlikely to receive much marketing from them, and you definitely won't receive pre-approved offers. If you opt out of marketing (different from freezing your report) you literally will not get anything.
3. Banks could - but don't - do a hard pull on existing customers. Why they don't do this, even though they could, probably can be chalked up to erring on the side of caution especially with mounting pressures from consumer advocacy groups and government bodies in the entire credit arena. Fines have been flying. I can also confirm that FIs were pressured into supplying FICO scores.
4. Since banks don't do hard pulls unless you ASK them to (let alone all the time) it is certainly worth paying attention to your hard pulls - activites such as MBMs, refined these days to mean applying on same day with same bank, are still good ideas to reduce pulls. If you can eliminate a HP with a phone call, it's worth it.
5. Can y'all hug it out now?