Sears Seeks to Overturn Visa Credit Card Policy : Lawsuit: The giant retailer wants to expand its Discover card affiliation.

Sears, Roebuck & Co. wants to issue millions of Visa credit cards, but the retail giant’s plan is not selling well at the San Mateo, Calif., offices of Visa U.S.A.

Chicago-based Sears has filed suit against Visa, seeking to overturn a corporate bylaw that forbids any institution affiliated with the Sears Discover card or the American Express card from joining the Visa network.

“We’re very pleased with the success of the Discover card,” said Beth Metzler, a spokeswoman for Dean Witter Financial Services Group, the New York investment firm that is owned by Sears.

“We did a great job with Discover,” with 38 million Discover cards issued since 1986, she said. “We think we’ll do a great job with Visa. . . . It’s a natural step.”

Sears wants to issue the Visa cards, to be called Prime Option Visa, through MountainWest Financial of Sandy, Utah. Sears bought the failed thrift from the Resolution Trust Corp. last year.

For its part, Visa would prefer to melt Sears’ plastic plans before they begin.

“In our view, Sears . . . would gain access to confidential proprietary business information and strategies” by joining Visa, which has 130 million cardholders in the United States, spokesman David Brancoli said. In its lawsuit, filed Jan. 16 in Salt Lake City by Sears Consumer Financial Corp., Sears said it is ready to begin soliciting customers in March for Prime Option. Like the successful Discover card, Prime Option would not charge an annual fee and would offer consumers “innovative and lower priced terms,” the lawsuit said.

Sears contends in the suit that Visa, through its exclusionary bylaw and a six-month moratorium on new non-bank members instituted in November, is violating federal and state antitrust laws and is engaging in unfair business practices under Utah law.

Sears will seek a preliminary injunction against Visa at a hearing set for Feb. 7 in Salt Lake City.

Visa represents another opportunity for Sears to hit big in the credit card business, said Kurt Peters, editor of Credit Card News, a Chicago-based newsletter.

“If you look at Sears’ financial statements, credit cards are the only place they’re making money,” Peters said. “They’ve become better credit card marketers than they are retailers.”

Although profitable, “the Discover card will begin to plateau,” said David Robertson, vice president of the Nilson Report, a Santa Monica-based newsletter.