Visa Credit Card Disclosures

Merchants Bank's filed agreement for Visa Credit Card Disclosures discloses a 9.99% purchase APR and a $30 annual fee. Against the 4,587 filings on this site, that rate lands around the 5th percentile.

What the agreement puts on the record

Merchants Bank submitted the terms for Visa Credit Card Disclosures to the CFPB's agreement database; this is what they contain. The filing runs five pages, and It is issued on the Visa network.

On the record here: a purchase rate, a cash advance rate, an annual fee line, a late payment maximum and a foreign transaction fee. It is silent on a balance transfer rate, a penalty rate and a grace period.

Where the purchase APR sits

Measured against every other filing on the site, 9.99% is about the 5th percentile for purchase APR; it reads as inexpensive against the rest of the filings.

The arithmetic of revolving

A $5,000 balance left untouched for twelve months accrues about $525 in interest at this purchase rate.

A typical filing in this index would charge about $1,229 on that balance; this one is roughly $704 a year below it.

Per statement cycle that is on the order of $41.22 on $5,000, which is the number that actually shows up on a bill.

Treat this as an illustration of what the disclosed rate does, not as a projection of a real account, which would be shaped by payments and by the fees described elsewhere in the filing.

When a payment is late

$7.80 is the disclosed ceiling on a late payment fee, placing it near the 4th percentile of the set.

What the card costs before you borrow

The annual fee is $30, charged whether or not the card is used. Against the filings here that disclose a fee, that sits at roughly the 80th percentile.

One way to size that fee: at the card's own purchase rate of 9.99%, $30 is roughly the interest a balance of about $300 would generate in a year. The fee is a fixed cost that behaves like perpetual interest on that much debt.

A first-year waiver applies according to the document — the $30 begins biting in year two.

For cash advances the filing discloses a cash advance fee of $3 and a cash advance APR of 14.99%. Cash is therefore 5 points dearer than buying something with the card. The grace period described below generally does not extend to cash advances, so interest on them usually begins immediately.

Spending abroad costs an extra 1% — about $50 on $5,000 of purchases, independent of interest.

Paying in full

No minimum interest charge is imposed, so a cycle that accrues a few cents of interest is billed a few cents.

The limits of this document

This page cannot tell you a grace period and penalty pricing, because the filing's disclosure table as read does not contain them.

It is worth being explicit about scope: these filings record terms and pricing. They say nothing about rewards programmes, cardholder benefits, promotional offers or who the issuer will approve, and this review does not speculate about any of it.

Where the authority sits

Everything here is a reading of the filed agreement, five pages of it, which is linked above and which governs. Terms also change between filings, so the date on the document matters.

In short

The purchase rate of 9.99% is one of the cheaper figures in this index — the central point in the agreement's favour. The $30 annual fee is charged regardless of use, so it is a cost that applies even to an account that never revolves.