Go ahead, blame Richard Fairbank for your junk mail. Much of it, anyway.

As the principal architect of credit card come-ons -- the low teaser rates, balance transfers and other special offers -- the innovative CEO of Capital One Financial Corp. forever changed a once-staid industry. Competitors carped, then followed his lead, clogging America's mailboxes. His shareholders celebrated all the way to the bank: Since Capital One was spun off by Signet Banking Corp. in 1994, the company's mix of sophisticated data mining, customized products and savvy branding has propelled its stock market value higher by a stratospheric 1,500 percent, to more than $23 billion. That's seven times the gain of the Standard & Poor's 500 index during the same period.

Now the 55-year-old onetime management consultant is taking on another business that he sees as ripe for reengineering. After years of beating lumbering commercial banks at the credit card game, Fairbank...