First Select Corporation

First Select Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of Providian Financial Corporation. First Select Corporation was established in 1998 as a means to support the efforts of the Providian Group and it quickly became a large profit center for the company.

The Providian Financial Group was at one time one of the largest issuers of credit cards in America. The company put most of its focus on the low income group, awarding them credit at extremely high interest rates. Providian Financial came under fire in the late 1990s with a series of class action law suits charging that the company used overly aggressive sales tactics to persuade its customers to accept credit and then disguised the terms and conditions of the interest payments and payment schedules.

The First Select Corporation was established to buy up the distressed debt from Providian National Bank at a percentage of what the debt was worth. First Select then took steps to collect on these debts through their call centers. Each First Select call center employee was supposed to aim for finding a “right-party connect” or establishing that the person on the other end of the line was the owner of the debt. The next step was to extract a “promise to pay” or at least a “promise to pay in part”.

By following these simple guidelines First Select Corporation managed to secure over $1 billion in contract within one year of operation. This was a huge milestone and it was appropriately celebrated by the parent company.

First Select Corporation was also proud of its operations. It saw its role as providing value to both sides of the equation. First Select Corporation’s first president Roger Van Duinen is quoted in October 1999 as saying “Our goal is to bring value both to the financial institutions from whom we purchased the accounts and to our newly acquired customers by helping them to rebuild their financial strength.”


However, if the numerous forum complaints on wrongful credit report filings and bad service are anything to go by, the company has not managed to uphold its promise to bring value to clients. There are countless posts from puzzled customers who claim that First Select had contacted them about an overdue account but they could not get in touch with the company to respond to the claims.


The dealings of Providian National Bank were taken over by Washington Mutual in 2005, but there seems to be no contact information available for its subsidiary First Select Corporation.