Upon completion in 1929, it became the tallest building in Baltimore (and Maryland), surpassing the neighboring Citizens National Bank to the south.

Maryland National's parent, bank holding company MNC Financial, began offering credit cards in the 1960s.

[3][4][5] Led by Charles Cawley, MBNA opened its first office in a converted A&P (Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company) food supermarket in Ogletown, Delaware.

[4] This proved to be a successful business, and other affinity affiliations with universities, organizations, and sports teams followed; by 2004, MBNA had more than 5,400 partnerships, making up about 85% of the affinity-card market.

[4] In 1995, MBNA moved its headquarters from a suburban location to Rodney Square in downtown Wilmington, Delaware.

In 2003, MBNA partnered with Bluefish entrepreneur Steve Sims to launch its own credit card.

[8] On June 30, 2005, MBNA announced that it was being acquired by Bank of America for stock and cash totaling more than $35 billion, and the deal was closed on January 1, 2006.

Although figures were never released, various media outlets including newspapers in Watford, where Loans.co.uk was based, reported the deal made founders David Cowham and Steve Hayes worth £100m.

In 1993, NationsBank (formerly NCNB, and originally North Carolina National Bank) bought MNC Financial (whose credit card division was spun off years earlier to become MBNA).

Employing more than 25,800 people around the world at the time of the merger with Bank of America, MBNA owned or managed more than $122.5 billion in outstanding consumer credit loans.

Most of this loan debt was held in securitized portfolios that had been sold to other entities such as insurance companies and pension funds.

[15] MBNA hired Hunter Biden (then 26 years old and a recent law school graduate) during the years when his father, then-Senator Joe Biden, was pushing for bankruptcy reform legislation supported by the company, which became law and makes it more difficult to acquire bankruptcy protection.

[22][23] In the UK, circa September 2010, MBNA came under fire for its interpretation of new UK legislation, under which credit card providers must allocate payments to the debt with the highest interest rate first: one consumer site called MBNA's interpretation of these rules a "disingenuous money-making tactic".