What It Does: Capital One specialises in offering financial services such as the issuance of credit cards, retail banking, issuance of loans, and commercial banking to its customers.
Mission: Capital One's mission is to play a role in our customers' success by adding humanity, simplicity, and ingenuity to banking.
Size and Presence: Capital One employs more than 1,000 workers in its UK office. Its office is located at Station Street, Nottingham.
Best Known For: Capital One is best known for being a digitally-oriented bank. The company doesn't charge fees for its savings or checking account. The company is also a parent organisation to numerous subsidiaries such as Paribus, ShareBuilder, Wikibuy, United Income, Blue Tarp, Monsoon Company, etc.
The Good Bits: The company offers juicy employment benefits to its workers, making it one of the best companies to work for. The bank also offers good career prospects to its employees.
The Not-So-Good Bits: Some job roles are subject to long work hours.
In 1994, Signet Financial Corp announced the existence of OakStone Financial, a corporate spin-off of its credit card arm. Later that year, OakStone Financial was rebranded as Capital One. The spin-off deal was finished the following year. As of then, Capital One was a monoline financial institution. This meant that all of its income came from a single source; credit cards. This came with huge risks, and when business was bad, the company incurred significant losses. The company enjoyed some success with its credit card issuance because it utilised data to construct demographic profiles. This helped it make personalised offers of credit to each customer.
In 1996, Capital One got approval from the government to establish Capital One FSB, which enabled the company to hold and issue out deposits on secured cards as well as the issuance of auto loans. Later that year, the bank expanded its business to the UK and Canada. This expansion gave the company a larger target market for its credit card business. As of 1997, Capital One's credit holdings had grown to $12.6 billion (£10.1 billion), and the company was actively serving more than 9 million customers. In 1999, the bank made plans to diversify into other services such as loan issuance and insurance. In 2005, Capital One entered the retail banking business by acquiring Hibernia National Bank. From 2012, Capital One made moves into the Fintech space, and in 2014, the company purchased a 25% stake in ClearXchange, a digital money platform.
The company continued acquiring companies and expanding strategically. Today, Capital One is one of the largest banks in the world.
To make banking better, this company adopts certain values that have shaped its corporate culture over the years. These values are excellence and doing the right thing. The company also welcomes diversity among its employees to create an inclusive environment that will alienate no one, including new intakes such as fresh graduates and interns. There's a good balance in the staff population between both genders.
Capital One heavily invests in the growth of its employees. The immersive work experience it offers gives fresh graduates and interns a chance to learn on the job. The company also offers various learning and mentoring programs, educational assistance, and competency-based development to ensure that employees are at their best. For the interns, the company offers Industrial Placements and Internships, while the freshers get a chance to enrol on the Graduate Programs.
A fresher working at Capital One earns an average of £30,000 annually.
Capital One is being prudent with its resources to achieve sending zero waste to the landfill as well as reduce energy usage.
A financial institution cannot be free of scandals, but nothing is widely published.