Jonquilyn Hill

At the same time, there's the development of what are called travel and entertainment cards.

So you have business executives who need to wine and dine clients who are traveling all the time.

For them, it's cards like Diners Club and American Express.

It's the only credit card you really need for travel and entertainment.

Which are really built on enabling you to more easily manage your expense account, to entertain clients, to impress people that you have, you know, a gold American Express card.

Swipe.

In the 1950s and 1960s, banks are increasingly looking to consumers as a new source of making loans, so making home mortgages or auto loans.

But if you're the biggest bank in Chicago and all of the affluent customers are moving out to the suburbs, you have a problem.

Banks under state laws in some states couldn't build more than one branch.

So all the biggest banks are built in the city center where the businesses are.

And so banks like Continental Illinois, like the First National Bank of Chicago, all begin to see credit cards as a way to attract these affluent customers to get them to continue to do their banking with central city banks.

And so it's really about kind of like suburbanization.

It's about white flight out of cities that is part of what's driving banks into the credit card market in the 1960s.

You know, at the moment when credit cards came out, were there any rules around the types of interests that could be charged?

In the 1960s, when a lot of banks really get into the market, one of the reasons why banks find credit cards attractive is because it's a new technology.

It's not regulated.

Banks were charging very high rates on credit cards.

Consumers would tend to pay between 1.5% and 2% a month.

And people are not very good at math, so that seems cheap, right?

2%, that's great.