Jefferson George, a Bank of America spokesman, told the Wall Street Journal Tuesday that the move impacted a "very, very, very small percentage" of small-business clients in a single lending portfolio that had lines of credit without maturity dates.

WSJ: Small Signs That Small Business Lending Is Up

To help prevent more of this, Visa and Mastercard have asked their member banks not to issue credit cards with such expiry dates.

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Perhaps that New York Times story from last year about singletons judging their dates by their credit scores was more accurate than any of us realized.

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Since everything is handled through the credit card, it makes things like dates using deals less awkward, joked Seth Priebatsch, founder of SCVNGR.

FORBES: LevelUp Offers With American Express Eliminates Coupons

If the charges were not completely paid by the specified dates, then interest would be charged to the credit card account in an amount computed from the date of purchase.

FORBES: Avoiding Excess Credit Card Interest Should Not Be A Taxable Event

In effect, the financing arrangement allowed for no interest to accrue on certain furniture purchases financed through charges to a credit card issued to petitioner by a certain credit card company if the charges were completely paid by certain specified dates.

FORBES: Avoiding Excess Credit Card Interest Should Not Be A Taxable Event

Punch in your membership information just once for your various loyalty programs (airlines, hotel chains, car rental companies and credit cards), and AwardWallet will continuously fetch your latest points balances and expiration dates.

BBC: Five best air travel apps

But after you've set things up, the site will continuously fetch the latest points balances, expiration dates and reward opportunities from all your flight, hotel, car rental and credit-card programs.

BBC: Tracking travel rewards

It recently renewed a standby credit facility for the government, although it is frustrated that the government has missed a series of target dates for the sale of key state assets.

BBC: African telecoms sales on hold