ING Direct to offer credit cards?

I just finished a survey from ING Direct asking about why I use the credit cards I do, what features I like to see in a card and how I would feel about ING Direct if it started offering a card.

I said it wouldn’t change my opinion of the online bank, but that’s not quite the truth.

If you don’t know ING Direct, you might not think adding credit cards would be such a big deal. Just about every other bank in the word offers them, after all.

But ING Direct made its bones being something of an anti-bank, focusing on encouraging you to save than goading you to spend. The non-savings services they do offer–mortgages and investing accounts through ShareBuilder–are designed to help you build your wealth in the long run.

The survey was short and multiple choice, so I couldn’t elaborate on how I really feel, which is:

If you have to offer a card, make it a charge card. Don’t encourage people to pile up debt with a traditional credit card that allows people to carry balances. Instead, offer one that requires payment in full every month. Charge cards also get favorable treatment in the FICO credit scoring formulas, as I wrote in “Build your credit without credit cards.”

Keep it clean. If you’ve ever read the “terms and conditions” boilerplate when opening an ING Direct account, you’ll be a little shocked. It’s in plain English. There’s too much of it, of course, but you can actually understand what they’re saying. If ING Direct swims into the shark-infested waters of credit card lending, I hope they’ll retain that sense of commitment to their customers by avoiding the hidden fees and other gotchas you’ll find in most credit card agreements.

How about you? Are you an ING Direct customer? Would you consider a credit card from this bank? Or would you rather they just dropped this idea altogether?

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