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Personalized interactions and streamlined online and mobile services distinguished the banks at the top of the heap in Temkin Group's customer service ratings.
August 21 -
Capital One (COF) and Fifth Third (FITB) are the only two banks that received perfect scores for transparency according to a study of checking-fee disclosures released Tuesday by WalletHub, a personal-finance website.
August 6 -
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau faces the task of determining how the 2009 credit card reform law has influenced the cost of credit. Its conclusions will likely offer clues to its future rulemaking and spur further clashes between bankers and consumer advocates.
January 22 -
Developing and implementing programs that accurately detect consumer vulnerabilities in the marketplace is important to better manage risk at financial institutions and for public policy purposes.
December 27 -
Fierce competition for customers has forced card issuers to sharpen their game, and the result for customers is better service, favorable rates and more generous rewards programs, according to J.D. Power & Associates.
August 23
Clarity is the key to making credit card customers happy, according to two surveys issued this week.
American Express (AXP) topped the U.S. Credit Card Satisfaction Study, set to be released Thursday by J.D. Power, thanks largely to popular rewards and benefits programs that are easy to understand.
"American Express is the leader in helping customers understand how to earn and redeem rewards," says Jim Miller, senior director of banking at J.D. Power, which surveyed more than 14,000 customers. "Their rewards are valuable and their programs are easy to understand, which leads to great customer satisfaction."
Meanwhile, CardHub's annual study of the clarity of applications, released Wednesday, found that Capital One Financial's (COF) fee disclosures are the clearest among credit card issuers.
For the fourth consecutive year, Capital One took top honors among the 10 issuers ranked in the annual study by CardHub, a personal-finance website. Capital One had a perfect score, the first time an issuer has done so since CardHub began the study in 2010.
However, the credit card industry still has a long way to go despite recent reforms, said Odysseas Papadimitriou, the chief executive of CardHub.
"Product disclosures are still too long and too dense, and marketing language is still misleading far too often," he said in a news release.
In the J.D. Power survey, Amex earned 816 out of 1,000 possible points. It has ranked first in each of the last seven years of the survey. Discover (DFS), another perennial front-runner, was close behind with a score of 812. It performed especially well in interacting with customers and solving their problems.
"Discover is very good at keeping the number of issues customers experience down to begin with, so of course that helps," Miller says. "And among all the issuers, they come out on top for getting problems resolved on the customer's first contact."
The lowest-ranked credit card issuers were Citigroup (NYSE:C), with 741, and HSBC, with 709.
"Those two tend to be toward the bottom," Miller says. "HSBC's customer satisfaction has been pretty low historically.
Citi's lower score may reflect an image problem, Miller says. "When we look at their true performance measures, they do a little better than their final score," he says. "Citi is still struggling from a brand perspective."
Overall, customers appear to be increasingly happy with their credit cards. The average satisfaction score was 767, a 14-point jump from 2012. "This is the highest level of satisfaction we've seen in the study's history," Miller says. He attributes part of the increase to general optimism about the economy and improvements in consumers' personal finances. Recent changes in the credit card industry, such as the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009, have also had a positive impact on consumers.
The CARD Act "has helped clear out a lot of the practices that were not customer-friendly," Miller says. "And as the economy has improved, companies have been able to put a lot of focus on improving service. A few years ago, they were more focused on cutting expenses and trying to return to profitability."
Still, many customers remain fuzzy on details. Less than half (47%) of respondents said that they completely understood their credit card terms. One-third reported that they were unaware of the benefits associated with their card, while 73% said they were unclear about interest rates.
J.D. Power's findings jibed with those of CardHub, which graded ten issuers for clarity in disclosing their cards' annual fees, rewards programs, cost of carrying a balance for new purchases and cost to make a balance transfer.
Overall transparency stood at 89.8%, up from 84.2% in 2012, according to CardHub. The 2013 score was the highest since CardHub began the study.
It also attributed part of the improvement to the CARD Act. Yet CardHub said there was plenty of room for improvement in companies' misleading marketing language and complex product disclosures.
"While there has been a lot of talk recently about the overall lack of consumer financial illiteracy we cannot afford to ignore the role that banks and regulators have played in creating an overly complex personal finance landscape," Papadimitriou said.
