NextCard

NextCard, Inc. was a United States company that was one of the first issuers of credit cards online, and the first to offer instant online approval. Its headquarters were located in San Francisco, California and maintained offices in Livermore, California and at 44th St. and Van Buren in Phoenix, Arizona. The issuing bank was known as NextBank and was fully owned by NextCard, Inc.

NextCard, Inc. was started during the Internet boom of the late 1990s. Jeremy and Molly Lent, a married couple, founded the company in 1996 as Internet Access Financial Corporation, later changing the name to NextCard in 1997. During the early 1990s, Jeremy Lent had served as CFO for Providian Financial Corporation which had relied heavily on direct mail marketing methods "to identify and recruit customers who made extensive use of credit cards". Convinced that he could adapt this marketing strategy for the Internet, Lent left Providian to form NextCard.

The Lents' business plan was based on two assumptions:

Because of these assumptions, NextCard, Inc. offered credit cards at interest rates lower than its competitors'.

NextCard issued MasterCard and Visa cards under its own brand, and co-branded cards with MyPoints.com, PlanetOut.com, and Amazon.com. NextCard also issued secured credit cards. NextCard was a major online advertiser at the time, as they only accepted applications online. Its website was "regularly named one of the top 50 financial websites by Money magazine and by 2000 attracted more online 'hits' than any other website in the financial services industry".

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