business card agreements

On the record for business card agreements: a 15.74% purchase APR, no annual fee and a 12-month 0% opening period, filed by Bank of the West. The purchase rate sits at roughly the 16th percentile of the 4,587 agreements indexed here.

The disclosed terms

This page covers the agreement Bank of the West filed for business card agreements. 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.

Zero percent, and then what

The filing discloses a 0% introductory rate running 12 months. For that window, balances covered by the promotion accrue no interest at all.

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.

The go-to rate is 15.74%. Any balance still outstanding when the promotion lapses starts accruing at that figure — about $511 a year on $3,000.

Valued honestly, 12 months at zero on $3,000 avoids about $511 of interest compared with the go-to rate — the whole of what the promotion delivers.

The purchase rate in context

The purchase APR of 15.74% places this agreement around the 16th percentile of the set — it is comfortably below what most issuers filed.

Because the rate is variable, the figure quoted is tied to an index and will drift with it. Nothing here is a fixed commitment.

To be precise about which number this is: the filing identifies it as the rate that takes over after the introductory period, not the introductory rate.

The arithmetic of revolving

Put $4,000 on the card and never reduce it, and twelve months of interest at the disclosed purchase rate comes to approximately $682.

Priced at the median of 21.99%, that balance would generate about $983 in a year — so this agreement comes in around $302 cheaper for the same debt.

Month to month it reads as about $52.07 per cycle on that balance.

Small balances do not get a proportionally small bill — the agreement imposes a $1 minimum interest charge in any month where interest applies.

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.

Default pricing

The maximum late fee is $41 — roughly the 89th percentile of the late fee ceilings disclosed across this index.

What the card costs before you borrow

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 26.74%. Cash is therefore 11 points dearer than buying something with the card.

Balance transfers cost $10 or 4% of the amount transferred, whichever is greater up front and then accrue at 15.74%. On $2,000 that fee is about $80 before any interest is charged.

Spending abroad costs an extra 3% — about $150 on $5,000 of purchases, independent of interest.

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

Paying in full

The filing gives 25 days' grace on purchases, meaning a statement balance paid in full within that window attracts no interest. That matches the 25-day median across the corpus almost exactly.

Where interest applies at all, the filing bills at least $1. On a tiny balance that floor can dwarf the rate itself.

Inside Bank of the West's filed lineup

This is one of 14 Bank of the West agreements collected here. Their disclosed purchase rates run from 14.24% to 27.74%, and this one at 15.74% is more expensive than 1 of them.

The limits of this document

Absent from the captured terms: penalty pricing. The original document is the place to look for any of these.

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.

Reading the agreement yourself

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

15.74% places this filing at the inexpensive end of the set, which is the headline here. With no annual fee, the cost of the account is entirely a function of whether a balance is carried.