business card agreements safe harbor Prime 5

The business card agreements safe harbor Prime 5 50 filing from Bank of the West sets out a 14.24% purchase APR, no annual fee and a 12-month 0% opening period. That purchase rate ranks near the 12th percentile across this corpus of 4,587 filings.

What the agreement puts on the record

This page covers the agreement Bank of the West filed for business card agreements safe harbor Prime 5 50. The filing runs 16 pages.

On the record here: a purchase rate, a cash advance rate, a balance transfer rate, an annual fee line and a late payment maximum. It is silent on a penalty rate.

The promotional period

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

Roughly 458 of the 4,587 filings indexed here disclose a zero-percent introductory rate, so this is a real feature of the document but not a rare one.

What matters more than the promotion is the rate waiting behind it: 14.24%. A $1,000 balance that survives the promotional window costs roughly $153 a year from that point on.

Put the other way round, the 12-month zero rate is worth roughly $153 on a $1,000 balance relative to paying the go-to rate from day one — a real figure, but one that only materialises for someone who was going to carry that balance anyway.

Where the purchase APR sits

The purchase APR of 14.24% places this agreement around the 12th percentile of the set — 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.

What the rate means in dollars

A $2,000 balance left untouched for twelve months accrues about $306 in interest at this purchase rate.

A typical filing in this index would charge about $492 on that balance; this one is roughly $186 a year below it.

That maths assumes a static balance and nothing else — no payments, no additional purchases, no fees folded in.

The downside terms

$41 is the disclosed ceiling on a late payment fee, placing it near the 89th percentile of the set.

The fee structure

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.

For cash advances the filing discloses a cash advance fee of $10 or 4% of the advance, whichever is greater and a cash advance APR of 25.24%. Cash is therefore 11 points dearer than buying something with the card.

Moving a balance onto this card carries an up-front charge of $10 or 4% of the amount transferred, whichever is greater, with the transferred balance priced at 14.24%. Shifting $5,000 across attracts something like $200 in fees on day one.

Foreign transactions attract 3%. On $1,000 of overseas spending that is $30, charged on top of whatever exchange rate applies.

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

The no-interest path

Anyone clearing the statement balance inside 25 days pays no purchase interest at all under this filing. That matches the 25-day median across the corpus almost exactly.

The $1 minimum interest charge means the effective cost of carrying a very small balance is far higher than the quoted APR implies.

Against the rest of Bank of the West's filings

This is one of 14 Bank of the West agreements collected here. Their disclosed purchase rates run from 15.74% to 27.74%, and this one at 14.24% is more expensive than 0 of them.

What you cannot learn from the filing

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.

More broadly, a CFPB agreement filing is a legal and pricing document. It does not describe rewards, benefits, sign-up offers, eligibility or approval criteria, and nothing of that kind has been inferred on this page. Where a card has features of that sort, they live outside this document entirely.

Go to the source

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

The purchase rate of 14.24% is one of the cheaper figures in this index — the central point in the agreement's favour. Because there is no annual fee, everything depends on the revolving behaviour: used as a payment instrument and cleared monthly, this agreement costs nothing.