Issuer: Capital One Bank
Amount: $1 billion
Launched: October 1997
Arranger: Morgan Stanley Dean Witter
"Our strategy doesn't lend itself to sound bites," claims Nigel Morris, president and chief operating officer of Capital One Financial Corporation. But this flamboyant ex-strategy consultant goes on to characterize his company's approach as "attempting to reconcile the unreconcilable".
The Virginia-based financial services company is now bringing its paradoxical style to the Euro-MTN market, signing a $1 billion programme arranged by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter for Capital One Bank. Nothing particularly remarkable in that, you may think. And Capital One could easily be dismissed as just one in the long line of US financial institutions entering the MTN market. But it stands out for two reasons: its low (triple B minus) credit rating and its brief history.
The company has been publicly listed for little more than three years - during which time its share price has tripled - and its roots go back less than a decade. It is the brainchild of Morris, and chief executive officer and chairman Richard Fairbank. As strategy consultants specializing in banking in the late 1980s, the pair saw the credit-card business as a sector ripe for innovation.