Wikipedia
NextCard, Inc. was a United States company that was one of the first issuers of credit cards online, and the first to offer instant online approval. Its headquarters were located in San Francisco, California and maintained offices in Livermore, California and at 44th St. and Van Buren in Phoenix, Arizona. The issuing bank was known as NextBank and was fully owned by NextCard, Inc.
NextCard, Inc. was started during the Internet boom of the late 1990s. Jeremy and Molly Lent, a married couple, founded the company in 1996 as Internet Access Financial Corporation, later changing the name to NextCard in 1997. During the early 1990s, Jeremy Lent had served as CFO for Providian Financial Corporation which had relied heavily on direct mail marketing methods "to identify and recruit customers who made extensive use of credit cards". Convinced that he could adapt this marketing strategy for the Internet, Lent left Providian to form NextCard.