The Credit Card Strategy at Wells Fargo

Here’s a new look at an old business:

Wells Fargo & Co, the fourth-largest U.S. bank, is trying to grow its relatively small credit-card business with an unusual strategy: appealing to its customers’ distaste for debt.

In 2007, Wells Fargo debuted the Home Rebate Card, which offers a 1 percent rebate that automatically goes toward paying down principal on a Wells Fargo home loan. In the coming months, the bank has plans to roll out cards that provide similar benefits to customers who have taken out student loans, auto loans and other types of consumer debt from the bank.

“The real thing customers wanted was to pay down their mortgage,” Tom Wolfe, Wells Fargo’s executive vice president for consumer credit solutions, said in a recent interview. “That created a thought process where we asked, ‘Why don’t we offer that service for all our products?'”

Wells Fargo believes offering such rewards cards is one of its best bets for boosting the credit card business at a time when consumers remain wary of taking on debt. Outstanding balances on credit cards and other types of revolving debt in the United States have remained flat over the past three years, Fed data show.

Only about one-third of Wells Fargo’s customers carry the bank’s own credit cards – a relatively small number for a bank that controls roughly 10 percent of all U.S. deposits and prides itself on selling customers multiple products. It is ranked eighth among U.S. credit card issuers, with purchase volume of $66 billion in 2012, compared to $566 billion at top-ranked American Express Co and $416 billion at second-place JPMorgan Chase & Co, according to the Nilson Report.

Posted by on August 6th, 2013 at 12:39 pm


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