consumer card agreements

The consumer card agreements filing from Bank of the West sets out a purchase APR of 18.74%–26.74%, no annual fee and a 12-month 0% opening period. That purchase rate ranks near the 64th percentile across this corpus of 4,587 filings.

What this filing discloses

consumer card agreements is one of the agreements Bank of the West has on file with the CFPB. It is issued on the Mastercard network and the filing runs 35 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. A penalty rate and a foreign transaction fee are not stated.

What the promotional rate is worth

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

Zero-percent openings appear in roughly 458 of the filings on this site, which puts this agreement in a sizeable minority rather than a class of its own.

Once the introductory period ends the rate becomes 26.74%, which turns a lingering $5,000 balance into approximately $1,532 of annual interest.

Valued honestly, 12 months at zero on $5,000 avoids about $1,532 of interest compared with the go-to rate — the whole of what the promotion delivers.

Pricing the purchase rate

Rather than a single purchase rate, the document gives a band — 18.74% at the bottom, 26.74% at the top, 8 points wide. The agreement discloses the range without disclosing how an account is placed within it.

Those two numbers occupy very different places in the corpus: roughly the 58th percentile at the bottom and the 64th at the top.

This is disclosed as a variable rate. The number above is a snapshot: it tracks an index, so it changes without the agreement being amended.

What the rate means in dollars

At the disclosed purchase APR, $1,200 revolving for a full year costs something like $368 in interest.

On a median-priced agreement from this index (21.99%) the same $1,200 would run about $295 a year, so this card costs in the region of $73 more annually for the identical balance.

Month to month it reads as about $26.66 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.

Treat this as an illustration of what the disclosed rate does, not as a projection of a real account, which would be shaped by payments and by the fees described elsewhere in the filing.

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 28.74%. That is 2 points above the purchase rate. The two halves of that fee cross at about $250: below it the flat $10 applies, above it the percentage does. 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 filing discloses a 18.74% balance transfer rate without an accompanying fee figure.

Penalty pricing and late fees

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

Grace period and minimum charge

Purchases carry a 25-day grace period: pay the statement in full inside it and the purchase rate never applies.

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

The limits of this document

This page cannot tell you a foreign transaction fee and penalty pricing, because the filing's disclosure table as read does not contain them.

It is worth being explicit about scope: these filings record terms and pricing. They say nothing about rewards programmes, cardholder benefits, promotional offers or who the issuer will approve, and this review does not speculate about any of it.

Against the rest of Bank of the West's filings

There are 14 filings from Bank of the West in this index. Their disclosed purchase rates run from 14.24% to 27.74%, and this one at 26.74% is more expensive than 7 of them.

The document itself

The original filing, 35 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

26.74% is an unexceptional purchase rate in this collection, and the rest of the terms follow the same pattern. With no annual fee, the cost of the account is entirely a function of whether a balance is carried.