Monty Loree: Hey folks, this is Monty Loree here from Canadian Money Advisor and I'm pretty excited. Today I've got Laurel Ostfield who is the communications manager over at Capital One Canada. As everybody's seen on my site - if you've been on my site at least once, you see there's Capital One all over the place. They've got good online base products that people can apply to online and they've been good enough to advertise on the site. Hey Laurel, how are you today?
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Laurel Ostfield: I'm doing very well Monty, how about you?
Monty Loree: Good. So you're the guys over at Capital One there. In my opinion, there are three basic credit cards that you're offering to Canadians - secured cards, low interest, rewards credit cards. Can you comment on that?
Laurel Ostfield: Sure. So we do have, as you said we've got different types of cards and they're geared towards people with different credit levels. So people who are trying to establish their credit or they need some help improving their credit, we have cards like our Secure Cards. If you're establishing credit, for example, we have a guaranteed Mastercard for newcomers. That one is in particular for people who are new to Canada and maybe haven't had the chance yet to establish credit history and they see different obstacles. So if you don't have credit history, get your first credit card. We do try to tailor our cards to the individual. We do have, like you said low rate cards. We're coming up with our smart line which is a 5.9% interest rate. That is for people with excellent credit. We also have a rewards card that's travel miles, and there's also cash back.
Monty Loree: So let's go back to the secure cards for a minute. So what are the examples? You said people who are just new to Canada. What are some other examples of people who would use that?
Laurel Ostfield: We have that particular one is for those new to Canada. We also have our Apply Today! Guaranteed Secured MasterCard®. That as well can help you establish your credit history. We have a low rate guaranteed secured Mastercard which has lower interest rates than other secured cards.
Monty Loree: I guess what I'm saying is some of the people who wouldn't have credit are students.
Laurel Ostfield: Sure or people who have had trouble with credit in the past and need to start fresh and having trouble securing a credit card. These guaranteed secured cards, what they do is they put some guard rails in place for people who aren't quite sure how to use credit cards. The other thing we do offer is a credit education website called roadtobettercredit.com. I encourage people to go on if they have questions about credit. We'll try to break it down up to the basic level . A lot of people don't understand the terms, they don't understand the language that they get - the terms and agreement from credit card companies. They don't quite understand what it means, so on RoadToBetterCredit.com, we actually try to put that in as plain language as possible so people know how to use credit cards properly. They are an important tool. I'm sure you've mentioned on your site, Monty that you need it to rent an apartment, rent a car, get a mortgage in the future. So what we want to do is find people the product that will allow them to build that credit but don't put them in a position where they're going to get in over their heads.
