• 0% APR* for 6 months on purchases,
• cash advances, and balance transfers
• Earn rebates towards any car, new or used**
• Build your credit history
• Free online account management
• $0 liability on unauthorized purchases
• No annual fee

Citibank was founded in 1812 as City Bank of New York. In 1894 it became the largest bank in the United States. In 1902 it began expanding internationally and became the first major US bank to establish a foreign department. By 1930 it became the largest bank in the world with 100 branches in 23 countries outside the United States. It changed its name to The First National City Bank of New York in 1955, then again to First National City Bank in 1962, and to Citibank in 1976. In 1981, Citibank rechartered itself in South Dakota to take advantage of new laws that raised the state's maximum permissible interest rate on loans to 25 percent (then the highest in the nation).

Citibank was one of the first US banks to introduce Automatic teller machines in the 1970s, in order to reduce the number of human tellers and give 24-hour access to accounts.

Citibank's operations in California are fairly recent, since it bought out Cal-Fed back in 2001. Also in 2001 Citibank settled a lawsuit for improperly assessing late fees. The class action lawsuit was for 45 million dollars. Following this Citibank lobbied in Congress (who they give huge donations to), to pass legislation that would limit class action lawsuits to 5 million dollars unless they were initiated on a federal level. Many consumer advocate websites report that Citibank is still improperly assessing late fees.

Citibank is now the consumer and corporate banking arm of financial services giant Citigroup, the largest company of its kind in the world. Citibank has operations in more than 50 countries around the world. More than half of its 1,400 offices are in the United States, mostly in the New York, New York, Chicago, Illinois, Miami, Florida, and Washington, DC metropolitan areas, as well as in California.

In addition to the standard banking transactions, Citibank offers insurance, Credit Card and investment products. Their online services division is among the most successful in the field, claiming about 15 million users.
 
About Credit Cards
A credit card user is issued the card after approval from a provider (often a general bank, but sometimes from a captive bank created to issue a particular brand of credit card, such as American Express Centurion Bank), in which they will be able to make purchases from merchants supporting that credit card up to a prenegotiated credit limit. When a purchase is made, the credit card user indicates his/her consent to pay, usually by signing a receipt with a record of the card details and indicating the amount to be paid. More recently, electronic verification systems have allowed merchants (using a strip of magnetized material on the card holding information in a similar manner to magnetic tape or a floppy disk) to verify that the card is valid and the credit card customer has sufficient credit to cover the purchase in a few seconds, allowing the verification to happen at time of purchase. Some services can be paid for over the telephone by credit card merely by quoting the number embossed onto the card (the credit card number), and they can be used in a similar manner to pay for purchases from online vendors.

Each month, the credit card user is sent a statement indicating the purchases undertaken with the card, and the total amount owing. The cardholder must then pay a minimum proportion of the bill by a due date, and may choose to pay more or indeed pay the entire amount owing. The credit provider charges interest on the amount owing (typically at a much higher rate than most other forms of debt). Credit card issuers may waive interest charges if the balance is paid in full each month, which allows the credit card to serve as a form of revolving credit, or they may choose to apply any payments toward recent rather than previous debt. Interest rates can vary considerably from card to card, and the interest rate on a particular card may jump dramatically if the card user is late with a payment on that card or any other credit instrument. As the rates and terms vary, services have been set up allowing users to calculate savings available by switching cards, which can be considerable if there is a large outstanding balance (see external links for some on-line services).

Because profit margins in the credit card industry can be quite high, credit providers often offer incentives such as frequent flier miles, gift certificates, or cash back (typically 1 percent) to attract customers to their program.

A secured credit card is a special type of credit card in which you must first put down a deposit between 100% and 150% of the total amount of credit you desire. Thus if the holder puts down $1500, he or she will be given credit in the range of $1000–$1500. This deposit is held in a special savings account. The owner of the secured credit card is still expected to make regular payment, as he or she would with a regular credit card, but should he or she default on a payment, the card issuer can deduct payments on the card out of the deposit. Secure credit cards are an advantage to anyone with poor or no credit history. They are often offered to people as a means of rebuilding one's credit. Secured credit cards are available with both Visa and MasterCard logos on them.