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The telephones at Capital One Financial Corp. ring more than one million times a week. People call to ask about their MasterCard balance, or whether a recent payment was received, or why their interest rate has jumped. And more than 1 million times a week, here's what happens -- before a caller hears the first ring:

The instant the last digit is punched, high-speed computers swing into action. Loaded with background information on one in seven U.S. households and with exhaustive data about how the company's millions of customers behave, the computers identify who is calling and predict the reason for the call. After reviewing 50 options for whom to notify, the computers pick the best option for each situation. The computers also pull and pass along about two dozen pieces of information about the person who is calling. They even predict what the caller might want to buy -- even though he or she isn't calling to buy anything -- and then they prepare the customer-service rep to sell that item, once the original reason for the call has been addressed.

All of these steps -- the incoming call, the data review, the analysis, the routing, and the recommending -- happen in just 100 milliseconds. That's one-tenth of a second, or one-eighth of the time that elapses between beats of a human heart.

Make no mistake: Capital One has some wicked-fast computers. And its growth rate has been nearly as fast. The company took shape in 1994, when it began as a spin-off of Signet Banking Corp. It now ranks among the 10 largest issuers of credit cards in the United States, with 16.7 million customers (it added 5 million new accounts last year alone) and total balances of $17.4 billion. Its stock chart looks more like that of an Internet startup than like that of a bank. Stock in the company, which was first offered at $16 per share, has traded as high as $140. The company, with 11,000 employees, has a market value of more than $7.8 billion.

Capital One's cofounders -- a pair of buddies with no previous hands-on experience in the banking industry -- had rocked the credit-card world while they were at Signet, where they had invented the "teaser rate" card and the "balance transfer" option. Those two innovations sucked millions of customers away from established companies, and the two men brought them over to their own company. The real secret of Capital One's success, though, has been its commitment to endless innovation. Lots of companies claim that they compete on knowledge. Capital One has enough information on consumers to fill the hard drives of more than 200,000 personal computers. It uses that information much as a physicist uses a particle accelerator: Cap One analysts and product managers come up with an idea for a product, bounce the data a bit, test it, tweak it, and launch it as fast as possible. In other words, they use the scientific method to design credit cards.

"Credit cards aren't banking -- they're information," declares Rich Fairbank, 48, chairman and CEO, whose father is a physicist. "When we started this company, we saw two revolutionary opportunities: We could use scientific methodology to help us make decisions, and we could use information technology to help us provide mass customization."