Charge Account Banking: A Study of Financial Innovation in the 1950s

Abstract

This study takes a step toward reconceptualizing the process of financialization, the reorientation of the US economy toward financial services that scholars view as a product of the 1970s economic shocks and subsequent regulatory liberalization. Instead, I argue that financialization was equally dependent on the gradual development of new financial technologies and business practices within the political and regulatory environment of the early postwar era. I do so by examining a cohort of small U.S. banks, which in the early 1950s began experimenting with a novel form of consumer credit: the charge account credit service. These plans allowed consumers to shop at a variety of local merchants using a single bank charge card. Bankers, though, developed charge account plans not as a conduit for consumer lending but as a business service, which enabled their small-merchant customers to compete with the credit plans offered by expanding department stores. In this way, charge account banking conformed with the 1950s political economy of finance, in which commercial bankers primarily lent to businesses and were still wary of consumer credit. Although they operated differently than the credit cards consumers know today, charge account banking plans were still a necessary first step toward this later financial technology, paving the way for commercial bankers to invest in unsecured card-based credit in the decades that followed.