WHEN MBNA moved to Chester it was hailed a prize inward investment coup for the region and the country.

So much so that, as Prime Minister, Tony Blair visited the site to claim some of the glory.

It grew rapidly, recruiting thousands of additional staff and expanding into four buildings at Chester Business Park. It also planned for the future, buying adjacent land to accommodate even more growth.

At one point it employed about 5,000 staff, though the credit crunch trimmed that figure back to about 4,000 today. This much admired business often found itself praised in the media for its employment conditions and its community involvement. It was a paragon of business virtue.

When it first set up in the UK back in the mid 1990s, its modus operandi, affinity marketing, was seen as ground-breaking stuff that would knock the traditional UK credit card businesses out of the park.

While it retains about 9% of the UK credit card market, MBNA’s encroachment appears to have been halted, for the time being at least.

The UK market is not the easiest to get a foothold in. While the nation has indulged itself in hundreds of billions of pounds of credit over the years, this is a very competitive market place. Savvy British consumers demand the cheapest rates. Anybody who has ever compared credit card rates can tell you just how many offers there are out there. Egg, American Express, Capital One, Tesco and many others are all bidding for business. The 0% balance transfer offer has been a staple part of the financial planning of many British consumers for at least a decade. Hence MBNA’s need to use affinity marketing, which involves issuing credit cards on behalf of partners such as professional associations, societies, charities and other banks. The World Wildlife Fund and Liverpool FC are among MBNA customers. Without these affinity partnerships, the US bank would have failed to break into the market here.

So why the sudden change of mind? Why is something once deemed good business, now thought of as bad?

The global banking crisis has undoubtedly concentrated minds in Bank of America’s boardroom. There is a much more rigorous requirement for banks to be profitable. These days, if a bank has access to funding lines, its going to deploy that money in the most profitable way possible.

Unfortunately for the 4,000 people who work for MBNA in Chester, credit cards aren’t the most profitable use of capital.

Once a credit card provider takes account of the wholesale cost of money and writes off the inevitable bad debts, there isn’t much of a margin left. Investment banking and other activities are more lucrative.

That’s not to say that there won’t be plenty of interest in the business from established players in the field. We report today that Santander and Virgin Money could be interested in buying MBNA.

But will they keep the Chester base? Sadly, the omens aren’t good. When Barclaycard acquired Egg earlier this year, it very quickly closed Egg’s Derby call centre with the loss of 659 jobs. Barclaycard was only interested in Egg’s customers, not its staff.

If something similar were to happen to MBNA’s Chester staff, they would be forgiven for thinking that the forces of capitalism can be fickle. In fact, what we are probably witnessing is clinical-minded, unsentimental, rational, business decision making on a global scale.