Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

It isn't news (the company announced the plan in November), but for those who don't know Citi jacked up the interest rates on credit card customers recently. In November, when it was news, Citi announced only a small percentage of customers would be affected, and that rates would increase two or three percentage points. Nevermind that the company promised in 2007 before Congress that it wouldn't raise rates on consumers unless they missed a payment or were guilty of some other misdeed, times are tough and Citi needs the extra money. What sounded not so bad in a press release turned out to be much worse than though in practice.

It's not hard to find stories posted all over the web of people who've been affected by these rate increases. I'll add one more example here. I have two Citi credit cards. One had a 9.25 percent rate, the other 13.75. This month they have rates of 18.9 percent and 19.9 percent, respectively. Now, I'm not about to default on any payments because of a higher rate or anything, I'm more annoyed at the timing.

Basically my generation's future has been mortgaged so that bankers and brokers don't feel the consequences of their failed chess-game with the market. What do they do to thank us? Raise rates, so that Vikram Pandit can add another zero to his bank balance. Forget about damaging customer relationships, this is damaging citizen relationships. It's appalling that these crooked thieves think they can take billions of dollars, refuse to lend it out to stabilize the housing market, spend billions on bonuses to the same people who drove these companies into the ground, then spit in the face of the people dolling out the cash. These guys should be the ones in Guantanamo.

As a Citi customer, my recourse (as with the rest of the affected customers) is to either opt-out of the rate increase and let the card expire, which will negatively impact my credit rating, or just deal with it and vow never to increase my relationship with Citi (or the third option, blog about it and contribute to the company's bad press). What do you think? Is this the way to treat loyal customers?