There are banks that have been around for hundreds of years and banks that have been around for just a few decades. It is possible to say that the banking industry reinvented itself when the breakthrough in global communications began to take impetus. One of the foremost banking corporations who sprung up about this time was the Capital One Financial Corporation, who from their base in the United States pushed their bank rapidly to the forefront bu taking full advantage of information technology. They became amongst the largest providers of MasterCard and Visa.

Founded in 1988 by Richard D. Fairbank and Nigel W. Morris, Capital One was an offshoot of the Signet Bank of Richmond. Virginia. Fairbank, a veteran banker, sniffed the winds of change in banking that were afoot due to ease of communication. He called upon Morris, who like Fairbank worked as a freelance strategic planner, acting as advisors for several of the United State’s leading banking corporations. Together they established a “think tank” with the aim of deciding how to best utilize the instant communication opportunities and aiming them towards the fast burgeoning credit card industry. Their plan involved a combination of slick marketing, rapid and customer friendly rapid clearance facilities, sophisticated operational methods and complete understanding of the technology that was developing before their eyes.  When they had completed the development of their package, Fairbank and Morris set off to present it to their banking clients, where to their surprise and disappointment, they were met with a fairly lukewarm reception.

Signet were way down their list of potentials, even though they had been involved in credit card operations for more than thirty years before Fairbank and Morris came to call. The bank’s directors were capable of seeing the vast potential that credit cards in the modern world would bring and backed the pair’s suggestions wholeheartedly. They backed them all the way, and pretty soon had turned Signet’s credit card operation, known as Capitol One into a $1 billion credit card industry. Their expansion would have even more rapid; however a collapse in real estate market, just as the idea was getting off the ground saw the credit market suffer a major setback.  However within a year or so, Capitol One had covered all of its lost ground and get back onto rapid growth mode. Such was the brilliance of Fairbanks and Morris’s thinking and the awareness of how trends would develop in electronic banking, that they could predict trends and make them happen well before their fast growing list of competitors.

As Capital One continued its dramatic success, in 1994 Signet Bank formed an offshoot just to handle its credit card operation, with Fairbank and Morris at the helm. In1995 Capital one reached another milestone, when they announced that their fifth million customers had just been signed up. In 1996 Capital One launched its first overseas operation in the United Kingdom. Their UK division started off by offering Visa and MasterCard credit card facilities.

From the mid nineties till the end of the millennium, Capital One began a period of continued growth and expansion, backed by wave after wave of aggressiveness marketing. They coupled this with a gradual easing of standards that their customers would be required to meet in order to borrow money. A situation that banking experts pointed out would cause a negative knock on effect in the banking world How right they proved to be!

At this point in time, the Capital One Group has grown to become one of the top ten credit card issuers on both sides of the Atlantic. They have a client base numbering more than fifty million with close to $150 billion in current loans more than $147 billion in managed loans

In June 2000, the Capital One Group opened a large facility in Nottingham adjoining its European operations centre, planned to augment the group’s European management facilities, bringing their workforce to more than 2,000.