The Capital One Financial Corporation is a U.S.-based bank holding company specializing in credit cards, home loans, auto loans, banking and savings products. A member of the Fortune 500, the company helped pioneer the mass marketing of credit cards in the early 1990s, and it is now the fourth-largest customer of the United States Postal Service and has the sixth-largest deposit portfolio in the United States.
 
It has its corporate offices in Tysons Corner, unincorporated Fairfax County, Virginia, near McLean.
 
Capital One was founded in 1988 by Richard Fairbank and Nigel Morris as a spin-off of Richmond, Virginia-based Signet Banking Corp (which was subsequently acquired in 1997 by First Union Corporation, which merged with Wachovia in 2001 and is now part of Wells Fargo).
 
Capital One entered the retail banking market with its acquisition of New Orleans, Louisiana-based Hibernia National Bank in 2005 and Melville, New York-based North Fork Bancorporation in 2006. North Fork Bank and Superior Savings of New England, both subsidiaries of North Fork Bancorporation, began using the branding of Capital One Bank on March 10, 2008. On October 18, 2008, Capital One announced it would purchase Chevy Chase Bank for US$520 million.
 
Capital One responded to the 2007 subprime mortgage financial crisis by jettisoning its mortgage platform, GreenPoint Mortgage, due in part to investor pressures.
 
On November 14, 2008, Capital One Financial Corporation was the recipient of US$3.56 billion of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act Federal bail-out. On June 17, 2009, Capital One completed the repurchase of the 3,555,199 shares of the preferred stock the company issued to the U.S. Treasury.
 
In February 2012, Capital One completed its acquisition of ING Bank, fsb, which operates as ING DIRECT in the United States.
 
In July 2012, Capital One was fined by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for misleading millions of its customers, such as paying extra for payment protection or credit monitoring when they took out a card. The company agreed to pay $210 million to settle the legal action against them and to refund two million customers.
 
International operations
Capital One commenced operations in Canada in 1996. Its head office is located in Toronto, Ontario at the North American Centre at Yonge & Finch. Unlike its diversified American parent, the Canadian business does not currently operate outside of the credit card market. Similar to the U.S. parent, Capital One Canada is Canada Post's second largest customer. In October 2008, Capital One Canada was named one of Greater Toronto's Top Employers by Mediacorp Canada Inc., which was announced by the Toronto Star newspaper.
 
The UK headquarters of Capital One is in Nottingham Trent House, Station Street, England. Capital One in the UK is associated with customers with poor credit rating and very high APR credit cards, up to 35%. The company was once active in Spain, Italy, France and South Africa, but has since withdrawn from these markets.
 
Unusual growth
Unlike other diversified financial services firms, Capital One began as consumer lending "monoline". Remaining a monoline is precarious because of the often-cyclical nature of consumer lending; it can be very profitable industry in good times and markedly unprofitable in bad, such that a monoline company will go out of business or be acquired fairly cheaply during hard times. Most consumer-lending monolines in the past twenty years have either gone out of business (e.g., The Money Store, NextCard, Royal Acceptance) or have been acquired (e.g., MBNA, Beneficial, First USA); Capital One is notable for having experienced neither.
 
Prior to this the company experienced tremendous growth as a monoline which it credited to its Information Based Strategy, a strategy it pioneered to use customer data to help tailor its products to customers, particularly subprime consumers. The company had one of the largest databases of consumer data at one time: over three terabytes of data by 1998., a global data management company and the leading provider of data warehouse development tools, today announced that Capital One Financial Corporation (NYSE:COF), one of the top ten issuers of MasterCard and Visa, has chosen Ardent's DataStage Extraction and Transformation Tool (ETT) to build data warehouses for all operational departments. The financial services company will deploy DataStage throughout the enterprise over the next year. This major data warehousing initiative is a core component of Capital One's information-based business strategy and will improve metadata management and the delivery of critical decision support information to executives and managers. It attempted to leverage this strategy outside of the finance industry, most notably in the cell phone market as AmericaOne which it eventually sold to Sprint.
 
While many monolines were acquired by larger, diverse banks, Capital One adopted the opposite strategy by expanding into retail banking in 2005. This was accomplished through the acquisition of Hibernia, North Fork and Chevy Chase Bank, three large regional banks.
 
In June 2011, ING announced the sale of its American ING Direct division to Capital One for cash and shares worth USD 9 billion. On August 26, 2011, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors announced it would hold public hearings on the Capital One acquisition of ING Direct, as well as extend the public comment period previously slated to end August 22 to October 12, 2011. The move came amidst rising scrutiny of the deal on systemic risk, or "Too-Big-to-Fail," performance under the Community Reinvestment Act, and pending legal challenges. A coalition of national civil rights and consumer groups, led by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, were joined by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) to challenge immediate approval of the deal. The groups have argued that the acquisition is a test of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, under which systemically risky firms must demonstrate a public benefit that outweighs new risk before they are allowed to grow.
 
Other skeptics of the deal include Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank head Thomas M. Hoenig, and columnist Steven Pearlstein. The acquisition was approved by regulators on February 14, 2012.
 
In August 2011, Capital One agreed to acquire the U.S. credit card operations of HSBC for US$2.6 billion. The deal would be a US$30 billion credit card portfolio to Capital One, and make the company the fourth-largest credit card issuer in the country.
 
In November 2012, it was announced that ING Direct would be renamed Capital One 360.
 
Decoupled debit card
In May 2007, the company began an experiment that came to be known as a decoupled debit card. This card is novel in that prior to this launch, a debit card was always tied to a traditional financial institution, such as a bank or credit union.
 
CapitalOne's Visa-branded decoupled card did not require that an account be opened with a "merchant" financial institution, and was made in partnership with the Ukrop's Super Markets, a Richmond-based grocery-store chain, and Sheetz, a regional gas-station and convenience-store chain. The Ukrops card was also tied to the grocer's reward program.
 
That one-year experiment ended in May 2008, and was followed up with a national rollout of its own version of a decoupled debit card tied to its own reward program.
 
Awards and Honors
The firm was named by Fortune magazine as one of the top 100 companies to work for in 2013, ranking at 87 on the list (up from 98 the previous year), citing opportunities for career advancement that include "up to $5,000 a year in tuition reimbursement, job rotations, shadowing, and mentoring."