Juniper Bank

» see juniperbank.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Juniper Bank was american at the regulatory layer, which for a bank is the only layer there is. A delaware charter on one side, a social security number on the application form on the other. Nothing about it was reachable from a modem in turkey in 2001, and nothing about it was ever meant to be, so this is a grave i can research but cannot remember.

Richard Vague started it in january 2000 in Wilmington, Delaware, which is where american credit card companies live for reasons that have to do with interest rate law rather than geography. He had run First USA before that and knew the business from the inside. The first money came from Benchmark Capital, which was an unusual investor for a bank and a very usual one for anything with "internet" in the deck at the start of 2000.

The plan was branchless. Everything happened on the web, from the application through to the statement, and the product itself was co-branded plastic: cards carrying the name of an airline or a university rather than the bank's own. AirTran Airways was on the roster, and so was Harvard. You were not supposed to feel loyal to juniper. You were supposed to feel loyal to whoever was printed above its name.

That worked well enough that Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce bought 51 percent in september 2001 for $95 million, then put in another $50 million in august 2002 to reach 89 percent. Which means that by two and a half years old, an internet bank founded at the absolute peak of the dot-com market had been quietly absorbed into a canadian balance sheet while most of its class was being written off entirely.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the funny part ~

Juniper survived the thing that killed its cohort, and then died of the thing that saved it. Wingspan and Security First Network Bank and the rest of the branchless class went down because customers did not want a bank with no building, or because acquiring those customers cost more than they were worth. Juniper sidestepped that by not asking anyone to switch banks at all. It asked them to take a card with an airline's logo on it, and the airline did the acquiring.

The catch is that a business built on other people's brands has no brand of its own to defend. When Barclays paid $293 million in august 2004, it was buying a card portfolio and the charter underneath it. The word "juniper" was not among the assets it had any use for, because Barclays already had Barclaycard, which had been on cards since 1966.

~ what came after ~

On 25 may 2006 the name went. The entity carried on as Barclays' american card business, the co-brand model carried on with it, and the customers largely did not notice beyond a different word on the statement. Barclaycard US still runs airline and retailer cards out of Delaware on the same logic Vague set up in 2000.

So this is a death worth being precise about. Neither the company nor the model failed, and nobody lost money on it. What ended was a name, on a date, because the buyer had a better one. Most of the 2000 vintage did not get to die that way, and there is something almost restful about a dot-com grave with no wreckage in it at all.

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