Rakuten American Express® Credit Card

The Rakuten American Express┬« Credit Card filing from First Electronic Bank sets out a purchase APR of 19.74%–33.99% and no annual fee. That purchase rate ranks near the 79th percentile across this corpus of 4,587 filings.

What the agreement puts on the record

Rakuten American Express® Credit Card is one of the agreements First Electronic Bank has on file with the CFPB. It is issued on the Amex network and the filing runs 18 pages.

On the record here: a purchase rate, an annual fee line, a late payment maximum and a grace period. A cash advance rate, a balance transfer rate and a penalty rate are not stated.

The purchase APR against the corpus

This is a tiered agreement: the filing discloses a purchase APR anywhere from 19.74% to 33.99%, a spread of 14.25 percentage points. Which end of that band applies is set by the issuer at account opening and the filing does not say how.

The floor of that band sits at about the 60th percentile of filed purchase rates; the ceiling sits at about the 79th. In corpus terms the same card can be cheap or expensive depending on how it is priced.

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, $1,000 revolving for a full year costs something like $405 in interest.

A card priced at the corpus median of 21.99% would charge roughly $246 on that balance. This one charges about $159 more per year.

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

$35 is the disclosed ceiling on a late payment fee, placing it near the 54th percentile of the set.

What the card costs before you borrow

There is no annual fee. That is the common case in this corpus — about 75% of the filings that disclose an annual fee at all disclose it as $0 — so it is a baseline expectation rather than a distinguishing feature.

Paying in full

21 days is the disclosed grace period for purchases — the interval in which paying in full costs nothing. That is shorter than the 25-day corpus median.

How it sits in the issuer's own range

This is one of 23 First Electronic Bank agreements collected here. The issuer's own range is 29.49%–35.99%. At 33.99%, this agreement is dearer than 11 of its siblings.

12 of the issuer's other 18 disclosing filings are likewise fee-free.

What the filing does not tell you

The disclosure parsed here does not state anything about cash advances, balance transfer terms, a foreign transaction fee and 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.

The document itself

Everything here is a reading of the filed agreement, 18 pages of it, which is linked above and which governs. Terms also change between filings, so the date on the document matters.

In short

The pricing here is middling by the standards of the index — 33.99% on purchases is near enough to typical. The absence of an annual fee means the rate is the only thing that can make this card expensive.