The First National City Charge Service, marketed as The Everything Card, was an early

credit card A credit card is a payment card issued to users (cardholders) to enable the cardholder to pay a merchant for goods and services based on the cardholder's accrued debt (i.e., promise to the card issuer to pay them for the amounts plus the o ...

introduced by

First National City Bank Citibank, N. A. (N. A. stands for " National Association") is the primary U.S. banking subsidiary of financial services multinational Citigroup. Citibank was founded in 1812 as the City Bank of New York, and later became First National City ...

(now Citibank) in the eastern

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

in 1967. It was intended as a response to the

BankAmericard Visa Inc. (; stylized as ''VISA'') is an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California. It facilitates electronic funds transfers throughout the world, most commonly through Visa-branded cred ...

(today's Visa card), issued by

BankAmerica The Bank of America Corporation (often abbreviated BofA or BoA) is an American multinational investment bank and financial services holding company headquartered at the Bank of America Corporate Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. The bank ...

. Issued under the initiative of National City Bank President

Walter B. Wriston Walter Bigelow Wriston (August 3, 1919 – January 19, 2005) was a banker and former chairman and CEO of Citicorp. As chief executive of Citibank / Citicorp (later Citigroup) from 1967 to 1984, Wriston was widely regarded as the single most influe ...

, the card followed the bank's purchase of an interest in the

Carte Blanche A blank cheque in the literal sense is a cheque that has no monetary value written in, but is already signed. In the figurative sense, it is used to describe a situation in which an agreement has been made that is open-ended or vague, and therefo ...

charge card A charge card is a type of credit card that enables the cardholder to make purchases which are paid for by the card issuer, to whom the cardholder becomes indebted. The cardholder is obligated to repay the debt to the card issuer in full by the ...

. However, the card proved to be limited by its regional scope, as it was tied to the area surrounding the bank's

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

base of operations. In 1969, the card was absorbed into Master Charge (now known as MasterCard), another card that had been developed by a membership association of four banks, the Interbank Card Association, which National City Bank joined. Citibank, as First National City Bank came to be known in 1976, made a further attempt in 1977 to create a proprietary credit card that was not tied to either Master Charge or Visa. The Choice card was, like the Everything Card, a regional credit card issued only by Citibank. It also proved unsuccessful, and its cards were reissued as Visa cards in 1987.

References

Citigroup Credit cards in the United States Credit card issuer associations Financial services companies established in 1967 1967 establishments in the United States {{econ-stub