Barclays Plc is a large global bank, and it issues credit cards. If you have a Barclays credit card, you can use it to buy stuff, in which case Barclays will lend you the money to buy the stuff. Some customers pay Barclays back every month; others take years to pay back the money they have borrowed from Barclays to buy stuff. In many ways, Barclays is well suited to lending them money: As a giant bank, it employs a lot of people who are good at marketing financial products, people who are good at making credit decisions, and people who are good at managing the payments infrastructure that makes credit cards work. It has branches where people can go to get credit cards, and checking accounts that they can link to automatically pay back their credit cards.
But Barclays’ ability to issue credit cards is constrained by a simple problem: Where would it get the money? Bloomberg’s Carmen Arroyo and Katanga Johnson report on Barclays’ quest to find a source of money that it can lend to credit card users:
