JPMorgan Increases Small-Business Credit

By Sharon McLoone, a contributing writer.

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Richard Quigley, president of the business-card segment at JPMorgan Chase's(JPM Quote) Card Services, talks about the company's new portfolio of small-business credit cards. Quigley started at JPMorgan in May after working at American Express(AXP Quote).

Question: You said in a recent interview that "we're starting to see a real stabilization" in the economy, and you consider that a harbinger of a turnaround. What signs of stabilization among small businesses are there?

Quigley: Some of them are sort of macroeconomic signs in terms of the GDP bouncing back and stabilization in terms of housing starts. Even some of the projections for unemployment, while assuming it's going to increase a bit from here, it's not going to increase tremendously. There's a confluence of a lot of different signs that show a bit of a light on the horizon.

Question: How did you figure out what kind of cards would appeal to small businesses and when to launch them?

Quigley: We believe that there are business cycles. There are some rough patches, but they inevitably start to get better. We saw that there are about 27 million small businesses across the United States and that they were growing rapidly. That 27 million was about twice what it was as recently as 2000. It's this combination of being an enormous market that's growing very rapidly combined with one other thing. It didn't seem that most other banks were crafting products that were really designed for small businesses. They were consumer products that were labeled as a small-business product. It became increasingly evident just how different small businesses are in their needs versus the needs of consumers. It seemed that there was a real opportunity to step forward and design products for this underserved segment.