Business card agreements

On the record for Business card agreements: a 16.74% purchase APR, no annual fee and a 12-month 0% opening period, filed by Bank of the West. That purchase rate ranks near the 19th percentile across this corpus of 4,587 filings.

The disclosed terms

Bank of the West filed this agreement for Business card agreements with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The filing runs 16 pages.

The disclosure covers a purchase rate, a cash advance rate, a balance transfer rate, an annual fee line and a late payment maximum. A penalty rate is not stated.

What the promotional rate is worth

This agreement opens at 0% for 12 months, the only period in the document where carrying a balance is free.

About 458 agreements in this corpus carry a zero-percent opening rate; this is one of them.

Once the introductory period ends the rate becomes 16.74%, which turns a lingering $5,000 balance into approximately $911 of annual interest.

The promotional window is therefore worth something on the order of $911 on $5,000, measured against the same balance priced at the standard rate for the same period.

Pricing the purchase rate

Measured against every other filing on the site, 16.74% is about the 19th percentile for purchase APR; it sits well down in the cheaper fifth of the set.

The filing marks this rate as variable, which means it moves with the index the agreement names rather than staying where it is quoted today.

This figure is the post-promotional rate. The introductory pricing is handled separately further down.

The cost of carrying a balance

Carry $5,000 on this card for a year without paying it down and the purchase rate alone generates roughly $911 in interest.

Priced at the median of 21.99%, that balance would generate about $1,229 in a year — so this agreement comes in around $318 cheaper for the same debt.

Broken down to a single thirty-day cycle, the same balance accrues roughly $69.25.

Note the $1 minimum interest charge, which overrides the arithmetic above whenever the calculated interest falls below it.

These figures are arithmetic on the disclosed rate, not a quote: they assume the balance is never reduced, ignore any payments, and take no account of fees charged separately.

Where the fees are

No annual fee appears in the filing, in line with the roughly 75% of disclosing agreements in this index that charge nothing to hold the card.

Cash advances carry a cash advance fee of $10 or 4% of the advance, whichever is greater and a cash advance APR of 27.74%. That is 11 points above the purchase rate. Advances under roughly $250 are charged the flat $10; larger ones are charged 4%. Cash advances also tend to fall outside any grace period, which means interest typically starts on day one rather than at the end of a billing cycle.

The transfer fee is $10 or 4% of the amount transferred, whichever is greater; transferred balances then run at 16.74%. Transferring $3,000 would cost roughly $120 at the door.

The filing sets a 3% foreign transaction fee, which adds roughly $45 to $1,500 spent outside the United States.

That is at the high end of this corpus — around the 91st percentile of disclosed foreign transaction fees.

Penalty pricing and late fees

On the fee side, a late payment can cost up to $41, which is around the 89th percentile here.

The grace period

Purchases carry a 25-day grace period: pay the statement in full inside it and the purchase rate never applies. That matches the 25-day median across the corpus almost exactly.

A minimum interest charge of $1 applies in any cycle where interest is due, which makes very small revolving balances disproportionately expensive.

How it sits in the issuer's own range

Bank of the West has 14 agreements indexed on this site. Across that lineup purchase rates span 14.24% to 27.74%; this filing's 16.74% sits above 2 of the comparable ones.

What is outside the disclosure

The disclosure parsed here does not state penalty pricing. Those gaps are gaps in what could be read from the filing, and the PDF may well address them in prose the rate table does not capture.

What this analysis can address is bounded by the filing: rates, fees and the terms around them. Everything a card issuer might advertise — rewards, benefits, bonuses, who qualifies — falls outside the document and outside this review.

Where the authority sits

The original filing, 16 pages long, is linked on this page and should be read before any figure here is acted on. It is also a snapshot: issuers refile as terms change.

In short

At 16.74% the purchase rate is low relative to this corpus, which is the clearest thing the filing has going for it on cost.