Hot on the heels of a $1.59 BILLION LOSS, JP Morgan Chase, has decided to target more affluent customers with its Chase Sapphire card, which has no credit limit. No need applying for this little baby though if your household income is less than $120,000 a year!!!
The card offers bonus rewards which can be exchanged for air miles, credit or even cash with every dollar spent, The Chase Sapphire card is available in Visa and Master Card versions.
As credit card companies continue to try to target richer customers, the color of your wealth keeps evolving - from gold to platinum to black and now blue, sorry, sapphire.
Increasingly, middle-class Americans are desperate to save money and therefore replacing debt from credit cards by using low interest loans and such like. The big credit card companies are fighting back though and aiming at the soft under-belly of society ie those people who don't mind (or don't notice) the hefty credit card interest rates and spend a lot of money.
American Express right now has the most wealthy, or highest-spending, customers but Chase hope to change this
According to Bloomberg.com:
"The Sapphire card will be available on the Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. networks, an advantage for JPMorgan because those cards are accepted in more places than American Express, Smith said. Visa was accepted at 8 million U.S. locations last year compared with 7.9 million for MasterCard and 4.6 million for American Express. American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault told investors Aug. 5 his cardholders on average spend 3.5 times more than Visa cardholders and 4.5 times more than MasterCard users."
Credit cards and the economy
Bloomberg.com also reports on the overall health of the credit card industry and what it says about the national economy: "JPMorgan's card operation lost $1.59 billion in the past three quarters as consumer spending fell 2 percent since its peak at the end of 2007, the deepest retrenchment since 1980. The division isn't expected to earn a profit in 2009 or 2010."
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