Capital One is basically a predatory lender. They sucker people into getting into debt (and paying outrageous interest rates) who otherwise wouldn't. They are not the only offender or even the worst offender, but they stand out because of their heavy marketing and psychological experiments on the lab rats, err, customers.
Capital One’s culture of experimentation also acted as a kind of buffer. Fast Company has reported that Capital One runs 80,000 experiments per year. As Christopher Worley and Edward Lawler III explain in the journal Organizational Dynamics, a bank like Capital One can randomly assign differing interest rates, payment options, or rewards to various customers and see which combinations are most profitable for any given segment of people. It’s not so different from how a pharmaceutical company might use a randomized control trial to test whether a new drug is effective, except that the results of the bank’s experiment will never get published, and instead of curing diseases, the bank is trying to extract more money from each customer. The use of experiments is itself an act of psychological distancing; it allows the analysts controlling the experiment to resolutely apply its findings as a profit-maximizing mandate without giving the strategy a name such as, oh, “predatory lending.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/155212/worked-capital-one-five-years-justified-piling-debt-poor-customers
See also: https://www.capgemini.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/capital-one-doing-business-the-digital-way_0.pdf
https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/research-department-working-paper/2017/credit-card-utilization-and-consumption-over-the-life-cycle-and-business-cycle.aspx
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Capital One will deny people credit cards for the reason that their credit score is too high. Why? Because people with high credit scores are unlikely to max out their cards or even to carry a balance. They aren't profitable enough for Capital One, who chooses to instead focus on their prime demographic, poor people who are likely to go into debt.
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