page_title: Capital One
section_title: Monoline credit card company (1994–2004)
hierarchical_section_title: Capital One / History / Monoline credit card company (1994–2004)
caption_attribution_description: English: Footprint of Capital One retail branches. Cities with more than one branch have progressively larger points.
context_page_description: 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. It is on the list of largest banks in the United States and has developed a reputation for being a technology focused bank.
  The bank has 755 branches including 30 café style locations and 2,000 ATMs. It is ranked 97th on the Fortune 500, 17th on Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For list, and conducts business in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The company helped pioneer the mass marketing of credit cards in the 1990s. In 2016, it was the 5th largest credit card issuer by purchase volume, after American Express, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup.
  With a market share of 5%, Capital One is also the second largest auto finance company in the United States, following Ally Financial.
  The company's three divisions are credit cards, consumer banking and commercial banking. In the fourth quarter of 2018, 75% of the company's revenues were from credit cards, 14% were from consumer banking, and 11% were from commercial banking.
context_section_description: On July 27, 1994, Richmond, Virginia-based Signet Financial Corp (now part of Wells Fargo) announced the corporate spin-off of its credit card division, OakStone Financial, naming Richard Fairbank as CEO. Signet renamed the subsidiary Capital One in October 1994.
  At that time, Capital One was a monoline bank, meaning that all of its revenue came from a single product, in this case, credit cards. This strategy is risky in that it can lead to losses during bad times. Capital One attributed its relative success as a monoline to its use of data collection to build demographic profiles, allowing it to target personalized offers of credit directly to consumers.
  Capital One began operations in Canada in 1996.
caption: Capital One retail footprint
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