New Goldfish cards from Barclaycard
A company merger is seeing a wide sweeping re-brand hit the credit cards of over a million customers this month.
New Goldfish cards from Barclaycard
This opens the door for us to bring rewards back into Barclaycard. ”
Consumers who own credit cards which were previously part of the Morgan Stanley Group or ran under the name Goldfish will soon receive new cards to replace their old plastic following the Barclaycard buy-out of US firm Discover.
According to reports the agreement means that the entire UK portfolio of Discover, including 1.7 million Goldfish customers and Affinity card customers along with branding rights, facilities and company staff will all now belong to Barclaycard.
Morgan Stanley bought the Goldfish brand and company from Lloyds TSB two years ago for a £1 billion, highlighting the strong repuatation of Goldfish products.
Excellent cards
Goldfish credit cards became popular because they earn customers vouchers to spend in stores such as Marks and Spencer.
Meanwhile the Morgan and Stanley moniker is being canned entirely and the cashback scheme it offers will stay, under a new name. The Morgan and Stanley cashback scheme was especially successful, offering 1% cashback on the first £200 spent on the card each month and 0.5% after that on all purchases.
There are also a number of smaller, less known cards which were formally run by US credit card company Discover, which now will be re-branded as Barclaycard products.
In every case the banking giant will send out new cards, PINs and account numbers to every single card holder.
A new vision
Amer Sahed, UK managing director of Barclaycard, said: “This opens the door for us to bring rewards back into Barclaycard.”
The industry recognise the importance of this big switch over because Barclaycard offered reward points with Nectar until that relationship ended in 2005.
Many credit card companies are now competing on what they can offer customers by way of rewarda and as such, making sure that they have plenty of bonuses for their customers is high on their agenda.
Marks & Spencer themselves now offer a reward card which will give customers 1 point for every £1 they spend and 100 points earns them a £1 voucher, so keeping up with the competition is the real reason for the buyout.
Barclaycard reportedly paid £35m to take on Goldfish and its affinity cards from American firm Discover Financial Services.
Barclaycard has said it will review customer accounts, on which there is £2 billion outstanding, as part of the transfer process.
Chances are that Barclaycard has more stringent vetting processes than its US friend Discovery and some customers will see, or will have seen a change in their accounts as a result.
Even though this is likely, Anthony Jenkins, Barclaycard chief executive, said: "Goldfish has similar credit characteristics to our existing UK business.
"The combination provides an attractive opportunity to deploy our expertise across a larger number of cards and customers.”
Written by Max Jennings ©
