Britain’s biggest credit card issuer Barclaycard has warned that it could face a total of £1.5bn of bad debt this year, as its customers’ financial difficulties increase.

Last year’s bad debt totalled £1.1bn after a rise of 40% over the year, and the company has said it expects a similar increase this year.

Although it would be easy to take this as a sign that more the country’s 11.2m customers are getting into trouble with their debts, Barclays says that this isn’t the whole picture.

Finance director Nagib Kheraj said that rather than more customers defaulting, the balances of those who did were significantly higher, and described this as ‘in a sense encouraging’.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 26th, 2006 at 2:34 pm and is filed under General Credit Card News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.