Amoco, Ford bank unit in Delaware offer cobranded Visa.

Following in the footsteps of Shell Oil Co., Amoco Corp. has gone down the cobranding road in a joint program with Associates National Bank of Delaware, a Ford subsidiary.

The Amoco Visa card offers a rebate structure similar to that of the Shell MasterCard, introduced last year by Chemical Bank of New York. The customer gets 3% back for Amoco purchases and 2% on all general purchases, up to $70 per year. The cardholder still gets a 1% credit on all Amoco purchases after the annual cap is reached, no matter how much gas the cardholder charges.

The Amoco card has no annual fee and a variable interest rate set monthly, depending on the balance.

For balances ors 1,500 or less, the rate is 17,9%. Balances over $1,500 carry a 15.9% rate. After Oct. 31, it will be indexed to the prime rate.

No Media Blitz Planned

In contrast to the Shell card's marketing debut, Amoco plans no major media blitz at this time. Chicago-based Amoco is promoting the card by direct mail only, considering the sixweek-old program a test of customer acceptance..

"We are going to be converting customers, but it's not a fullblown 'let's tell the world' type of promotion," said Amoco spokesman Dan Larson. "It's limited in its scope at this point."

Mr. Larson said more than 500,000 Amoco proprietary cardholders were mailed the Visa plastic in early May. He said they were instructed to call an '800' number to activate the cards and terminate their existing Amoco accounts.

Jury Still Out

Mr. Larson said it was too early to tell if the program is being embraced by customers; he declined to say how many Amoco cardholders had switched to the new cobranded Visa.

Mr. Larson also said Amoco had no plans to convert all of its 8.7 million proprietary cardholders to the Visa program. But the $3 billion-asset Associates National Bank, a subsidiary of Ford Motor Co.'s Associates Corp. unit, has agreed to purchase the private label program from Amoco.

The Wilmington-based bank already issues 700,000 Amoco affinity cards.

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