Update 11/8/2018: As you can read from the comments in this post, Mercury’s customer service is somewhere from non-existent to terrible. Here’s some useful information provided by Ellie:
In 2016 Barclays, then known as Barclaycard, sold a chunk of its subprime credit card balances. Credit Shop acquired 700,000 credit card accounts from Barclays, with roughly $1.6 billion in balances. That deal placed the small Austin firm among the country’s 20 largest credit card issuers.
Credit Shop released its own credit card in May of this year, the Mercury Mastercard. The cards will be issued by First Bank & Trust of Brookings, South Dakota, and will target people with FICO scores ranging between 575 and 675. Now they are transferring credit cards purchases from Barclays, to their own card. They have sent out letters to some Barclays cardmembers informing them that their Barclays cards will be converted to Mercury Mastercards.
People that are getting the letters probably had lower scores back in 2015 or 2016 and maybe were behind in payments or had balances on their cards. Most of the cards affected seem to be Barclays Rewards MasterCards, but there’s also some Barclays Arrival Plus cards included.
As for the rewards and perks of this Mercury card, there’s not much info out there. Credit Shop’s CEO says that the “Mercury Mastercard is designed to give hard-working, middle market consumers access to a better credit card, at a reasonable price, so they can manage their financial lives better”. Doesn’t sound very promising.
