Household HSBC Watch

Thursday, June 09, 2005, 0743 GMT [Dow Jones] West LB sees HSBC Holdings (HBC) acquisitions of Neiman Marcus credit card for $640M as a positive, albeit of little impact. “This is in line with their group strategy; they’ve got a sizeable cards portfolio with some 50 million cards around the world in issue, and they can probably strip out some costs,” says analyst James Hamilton. “It’s too small in the HSBC context to have that much impact.”

Consumer advocates at Household - HSBC Watch said today that if the deal is seen as a positive nobody from West LB has a Neiman Marcus credit card, or they don’t yet realize that predatory lender Household International will be responsible for the cards. Another theory is that “they can probably strip out some costs” means in a predatory manner from the customer, not in the overall operational fine tuning. “We refer to Shea v Household and hundreds of similar complaints since Shea v Hosuehold was settled” said the organization. “At least Neiman Marcus has the good sense to control the customer interface, otherwise HSBC Retail Services would alienate many Neiman Marcus customers, such as they do with Best Buy.”