Capital One
Capital One Financial Corporation is an American bank holding company specializing in credit cards, auto loans, banking, and savings accounts, headquartered in McLean, Virginia with operations primarily in the United States.[2] It is the 12th largest bank in the United States by total assets as of 2022, the third largest issuer of Visa and Mastercard credit cards, and one of the largest car finance companies in the United States.[2]
Company type
July 21, 1994 in Richmond, Virginia
- Richard Fairbank (Chairman, President and CEO)
- Andrew Young (CFO)
US$38.37 billion (2022)[1]
US$1.54 billion (2022)
US$1.16 billion (2022)
US$444.23 billion (2022)
US$50.86 billion (2022)
50,800 (2021)
6.59% (2022)
The bank has approximately 750 branches, including 30 café style locations,[3] and 2,000 ATMs. It is ranked 106th on the Fortune 500,[3] 15th on Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For list,[4] and conducts business in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.[2] The company helped pioneer the mass marketing of credit cards in the 1990s.[5]
The company's three divisions are credit cards, consumer banking and commercial banking. As of December 31, 2022, the company had loans receivable of $114 billion from credit cards, $75 billion from auto loans, and $85 billion from commercial loans.[2]
Capital One operates 3 divisions as follows:[2]
Corporate citizenship[edit]
Capital One operates some charitable programs. The accountability organization National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy has been highly critical of Capital One's relatively low rate of giving, stating that "Capital One's philanthropic track record is dismal".[93] The organization pointed out that Capital One's donations of 0.024% of revenue were much less than the industry median of 0.11% of revenue.[93] Capital One has disputed the groups figures, saying that "... In 2011 alone, our giving totals are more than 6 times greater ($30 million) than the number given by the NCRP".[94]
Investigations and legal actions[edit]
Fines for misleading customers to pay extra for services[edit]
In July 2012, Capital One was fined by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for misleading millions of its customers, for example by requiring customers to pay extra for payment protection or credit monitoring when they took out a card.[95] The company agreed to pay $210 million to settle the legal action and to refund two million customers.[96] This was the CFPB's first public enforcement action.[97]
Automated dialing to customers' phones[edit]
In August 2014, Capital One and three collection agencies entered into an agreement to pay $75.5 million to end a consolidated class action lawsuit pending in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois alleging that the companies used an automated dialer to call customers' cellphones without consent, which is a violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991.[98] It is notable that this legal action involved informational telephone calls, which are not subject to the "prior express written consent" requirements which have been in place for telemarketing calls since October 2013.[99]
July 2019 security breach[edit]
Capital One publicly acknowledged on July 29, 2019, that they had found unauthorized access had occurred ten days earlier by an individual who had breached the account and identity security of 106 million people in the United States and Canada.[100] one of the largest data breaches of personal information.[101] The FBI arrested Paige Thompson, who had previously worked as a software engineer for Amazon Web Services, Capital One's cloud hosting company. Capital One declared that Thompson had accessed about 140,000 Social Security numbers, a million Canadian social insurance numbers; 80,000 bank account numbers, and an unknown number of names and addresses of customers. Capital One began offering free credit monitoring services to those affected by the breach.[102][103]
Thompson's employment at Amazon appears to have ended in September 2016. Amazon stated that the security vulnerability she used to access Capital One could have been discovered by anyone, the information that facilitated her activity was not gained from work at Amazon, and that she gained access via "a misconfiguration of the (Capital One-designed) web application and not the underlying (Amazon-designed) cloud-based infrastructure".[104]
In 2022, Thompson was convicted of five felonies and two misdemeanors. She was sentence to time served and five years of probation.[105]
