The answer is: it depends.
Here are two real world examples:
1) Best Buy used to do business with a couple different banks, including Capital One. We had a Cap1 Best Buy card with a $2k limit. Less than a year ago, Best Buy decides to stop their relationship with Cap1 and switch all our cards to Citibank - which is a good thing IMHO. In any case, the Cap1 TL shows 'transfered to another lender' on our CRs, and the new CBNA (Citibank) TL shows the same original starting date. Since that date is 12/2008, that was a nice AAoA boost on our CRs, since we have two tradelines reflecting it.
2) When we got my wife's wedding ring, we decided to get a jewlery store card that offered a 12-month 0% APR and additional discount. We planned on using it for her ring, paying it off in a couple months, than buying my ring on it as well. Unfortunately, a month after we opened the account, the store ceased it's affiliation with that bank (also Citibank). Even more unfortunate, instead of transfering the account to the new bank they partnered with, they just closed all the accounts. We still had the promotion for purchases up until then, and we still had time to pay off the account (which we did as long as possible without acruing interest to maximize the life of the account), but I was VERY pissed about what happened. The store never warned us, and we wouldn't have opened the account if we knew what was going to happen. While we still have the TL on her CR, it only shows a few months of activity and it being closed.
So, when something like this happens, it could go either way. In some cases, it works out in your favor. In others, while it's not a negative, it certainly isn't a positive. Either way, you can't really do anything about it.
@Kraner wrote:Just to kill some time I wanted to re-educate myself on what type of cards USA Triathlon offered. To my surprise I couldn't find ANYTHING about it although it used to be there. It was backed by Capital One and the page it used to be at says "Unfortunately, we’re no longer offering this credit card program."
Which got me thinking. What if Amazon would all of a sudden pull their relationship with Chase and my card is no longer useable? What if Walmart did the same with GE? Could this hurt my credit or would they transfer everything to a different card and keep all the information I built up.
Thanks.
I would hope the account would just be transferred to the other bank and go on as usual. Sometimes, like when TD Bank took over Target, nothing at all happens...as is evidenced by my still abyssmal $200 CL...lol.
