HFC Company LLC history

Mackey's father died in 1879, leaving him a substantial amount of money.

In 1883 Mackey constructed a building in Minneapolis to house his prospering business and opened his first branch office, in St Paul.

He moved in September 1885 and from there directed the rapid opening of more branch offices.

By 1890 he had opened 13 branches in the Midwest and the East, and additional offices had sprouted in Chicago.

In 1896 a second Pittsburgh branch began another significant innovation--soliciting customers for new loans by mail.

In 1905, Mackey's company added to its pioneering efforts in the field of consumer credit by introducing installment payment systems.

Arthur Ham, a Columbia University graduate student, was given a grant by the Russell Sage Foundation in 1907 to research the small-loan industry.

By 1908, it had several dozen offices nationwide, with total loan accounts of $1.5 million.

By 1913, 25 states had adopted loan legislation limiting interest rates to 6 percent.

The Uniform Small Loan Law was passed in 1916.

The Household Finance Corp. came into being in 1925 when Mackey merged 33 of his company's branch offices across the country into a single entity.

On Harbison's recommendation, Household was the first loan company to offer an interest rate below the legal limit, dropping its monthly rate to 2.5 percent in 1928.

The first was "Money Management for Households," in April 1931.

The credit freeze was lifted by June 1932, and HFC quickly returned to its pattern of growth despite lingering questions about the health of the economy.

The founding director was Kenneth MacLeod, who remained at the helm until 1943.

Consequently, loan accounts for banks were 40 percent higher than that of loan companies by 1946.

He directed a period of phenomenal growth for HFC that continued after his retirement in 1951.

Education Funds, Inc. was created in 1960 to offer help in paying college tuitions.

In 1965, Household Finance entered the retailing business on a large scale when it purchased the City Products Corp., owners of the “Ben Franklin” retail chain that had long been operated by Butler Bros. of Chicago.

With the acquisition of Von's, the merchandising division's net sales exceeded $1 billion for the first time in 1969.

In 1970 a data-processing system called Orbit was installed at all United States branch offices.

In 1976 HFC acquired Keystone Savings and Loan in California and several commercial banks in Colorado.

In 1977 a New York Supreme Court judge charged that Household unethically solicited former, unpaid borrowers who had since been declared bankrupt.

In 1981, Household Finance changed its name to Household International Inc.

By 1985, just before it sold the Ben Franklin stores, Household had 28,000 employees worldwide and had about $3.4 billion in annual revenues.

In early 1988 Edwin P. Hoffman, a 19-year veteran of New York-based banking giant Citicorp, became president and chief operating officer at Household; Clark remained the company's chairman.

After a transition period, during which the heads of Household's three main units comprised an office of the president, Clark in late 1994 selected as chief executive an outsider, William F. Aldinger, who had been with Wells Fargo & Co.

The GM card proved to be an immense success, and by mid-1996 was the country's largest so-called affinity card with 12 million cardholders.

Later in 1997 Household quickly tripled the size of its nascent auto loan operation when it acquired San Diego-based ACC Consumer Finance Corp. for about $200 million.

In 2003, Household International was bought out by British banking giant HSBC Holdings PLC.