NextCard, Inc. was a United States company that was one of the first issuers of credit cards online, and the first to offer instant online approval. Its headquarters were located in San Francisco, California and maintained offices in Livermore, California and at 44th St. and Van Buren in Phoenix, Arizona. The issuing bank was known as NextBank and was fully owned by NextCard, Inc. NextCard, Inc. was started during the Internet boom of the late 1990s. Jeremy and Molly Lent, a married couple, founded the company in 1996 as Internet Access Financial Corporation, later changing the name to NextCard in 1997. During the early 1990s, Jeremy Lent had served as CFO for Providian Financial Corporation which had relied heavily on direct mail marketing methods "to identify and recruit customers who made extensive use of credit cards". Convinced that he could adapt this marketing strategy for the Internet, Lent left Providian to form NextCard. Operations The Lents' business plan was based on two assumptions: Since a key metric in the credit card industry is acquisition cost of a new customer, he felt that he could "use the internet to undercut the average acquisition cost" of its "brick-and-mortar" competitors and He believed his company would have "significantly lower bad debt losses than conventional credit card issuers since marketing research had found that internet users were generally more affluent and, thus, better credit risks, than individuals drawn from the general population of consumers". Because of these assumptions, NextCard, Inc. offered credit cards at interest rates lower than its competitors'. NextCard issued MasterCard and Visa cards under its own brand, and co-branded cards with MyPoints.com, PlanetOut.com, and Amazon.com. NextCard also issued secured credit cards. NextCard was a major online advertiser at the time, as they only accepted applications online. Its website was "regularly named one of the top 50 financial websites by Money magazine and by 2000 attracted more online 'hits' than any other website in the financial services industry". The company set aggressive growth targets and went public in 1999. Following its initial public offering, the internet 'bubble' in the stock market had burst. This "effectively shut off the access of NextCard and thousands of other struggling Internet companies to the debt and equity markets" . Jeremy Lent's assumptions also proved to have flaws; the acquisition cost per-customer was higher than expected because Internet users tended to ignore NextCard's online ads (which were