Dear Credit Friends, I love to be negative. It's my greatest joy in life, and I have had many others. But I was checking out the Aria website and looked at their midlevel Visa, which I believe is called Portrait. It actually looked better than I expected. The Persona, the obvious subprime offering, could be slightly worse than the present anonymous Visa (since they mention a possible $89 annual fee.) But the Portrait, even at 20.49%, has no annual fee and looks like a lot of other cards. It's obvious that Providian is trying to diversify their offerings.
The Aria Portrait while certainly better than its sub sub-prime Persona sibling is little better than the Aspire Visa and doesn't even come close to matching typical visa classic's from such prime grantors as Citibank, Chase, Capital One even Fleet thus putting it squarely in the sub-prime category. Unfortunately, Providian's policy is to rarely issue this card, and definately to nobody who has the slightest negative on their report, preferring to gouge people for the annual fee and interest rate of the Persona. Posts from the few who have been granted this card describe disenchantment and and cancellation after a short period in the search for better offers and a 'real' prime card.
