How do I start a new credit card issuing business?

1) Raise a lot of money - ALOT of money. If you are issuing a credit card, you are a bank. This means that you have to be able to give people money and stay afloat while they slowly pay you back with interest 2) Get approved - There is an absolute maze of government regulations on money handling. You would need to jump through hundreds of hoops to be authorized to be giving out credit cards. 3) Build infrastructure - Credit card transaction data adds up very quickly. You would need some heavy hitting teams of engineers with even heavier hitting hardware to manage all the transactions and transaction data. 4) Beef up security - This is incredibly sensitive information, which is of extreme value to both you and your customers. You cannot, absolutely cannot be compromised on this front. 5) Beef up security again - And again, and again, and again. 6) Operations - Now you actually need the cards. You need to contract manufacturers of plastic cards and most likely hire some design work to make them look nice. You also need to customize magnetic strips for unique cards and find a way within your infrastructure to manage them, in addition to pressing card no, customer info, exp. date, and security codes. 7) Market - Interest from the perspective of the company is small. You are making back single digit fractions of the amount of money borrowed. In order to make this whole process profitable (you're probably very very deep in the hole at this point) you need hundreds of thousands of customers. That means intense marketing on all media channels, as well as setting up branches and doing excessive legwork. 8) Profit.

If you want to become a general purpose credit card issuer, you must be a bank as only banks can become a member of Visa/MasterCard and issue on their networks. Being a credit card issuer means you are actually lending the money and taking on credit risk.  Credit card issuing in the US has proven to be a business with significant economies of scale related to credit scoring, collections, and direct marketing.   The industry has undergone substantial consolidation with a few large issuers (Bank of America, Citibank, Chase, Capital One, etc.)  It has gotten to the point where hundreds of small banks and credit unions offer credit cards that are actually issued by big banks such as Bank of America (through its MBNA acquisition). If Instead you are interested in marketing credit cards with your brand, big banks have programs for issuing "affinity" and "co-branded" credit cards.  Examples include cards that are branded by charities (e.g., Nature Conservancy), colleges/universities, consumer brands (e.g., MLB baseball teams).  The issuers then pay the affinity groups or brands for the use of the brand and often a fee for each new account.  Larger brands often work with banks to create reward credit cards that offer rewards connected with credit card (e.g. airline credit cards with airline miles).  The biggest players in the affinity/cobrand/rewards credit card market are: Bank of America (former MBNA, often does business as FIA Card Services) Chase (former First USA) American Express Barclays US (former Juniper) Capital One US Bank