2000年　消費者金融サービス研究学会年報　No.8

This paper explores a new effective strategy in the American credit card industry by analyzing Capital One financial (COF) as an unique case. The reason of choosing COF is that it is the only one firm that hasn’t implemented M&A strategy among the high performance companies in the industry. The author focused on COF’s strategy, and found that the characteristics of its strategies are Mass customization and hypercompetitive strategy.

Then, the author examined how COF can gain competitive advantage while adopting two different strategies simultaneously. COF has an organizational capability to predict customer’s credit risk and suitable product for each customer. On the basis of this capability, COF constructs unified process to offer whole line of their products.

From these facts, two conclusions are gained. (1) COF can pursue hypercompetitive strategy only with pursuing mass-customization strategy simultaneously, (2) the company can develop new product in a short period cycle due to their uniformed process of mass-customization implementation.