T-Mobile Launches First Credit Card With Capital One

The wireless company’s new card will feature no annual fees and 2% in T-Mobile rewards, company officials told Bloomberg News on Saturday (Nov. 1).

“It’s not often you get to build a card from the ground up,” said Scott Simpson, Capital One’s senior vice president of U.S. card partnerships.

According to the report, the new card will run on Visa’s network, with T-Mobile customers getting $5 off their bills per month when they use the card via auto pay. T-Mobile customers can start applying for the new card Tuesday (Nov. 4.)

André Almeida, T-Mobile’s president of growth and emerging businesses, said in an interview that the carrier had mulled a credit card before but hadn’t found the right partner.

“It’s about making it easier for people to earn rewards so you don’t need an Excel spreadsheet,” he told Bloomberg.

Bloomberg noted that this will be Capital One’s first co-branded card since it acquired Discover for $35 billion earlier this year. The company previously launched card partnerships with retailers like Kohl’s, Bass Pro Shops and Williams-Sonoma.

During an earnings call last month, CEO Richard Fairbank said that the company’s acquisition of Discover was the chief driver of its domestic card results for the quarter.

“Looking through the Discover impact, the combined domestic card business delivered another quarter of top line growth, strong margins and improving credit,” he said.

In other credit news, PYMNTS wrote last month about new PYMNTS Intelligence research showing that many households, including high-income ones, have doubts about their creditworthiness in spite of healthy financial profiles.

“Many Americans believe they would have little or no chance of being approved for a new credit product, even though actual approval rates show otherwise,” the report said.

That uncertainty includes people in the upper-income brackets, with 33% of consumers who make more than $100,000 per year saying they believe they would probably or certainly be denied a new credit card application.

The reality is that denial rates are modest. Among respondents without an active credit card, only 15% said they had ever been turned down for their desired limit. High earners may have strong FICO scores and ample liquidity, but they remain cautious about tapping new credit lines, often conflating economic uncertainty with personal risk.