WILMINGTON, Del. – MBNA Corp. is going continental.

The credit-card lending firm, which employs about 5,000 in Maine as MBNA America, has announced plans to set up shop in Madrid, Spain. MBNA Europe Bank Ltd., which operates in the United Kingdom, has received clearance to apply to the Bank of Spain for a branch license to operate in that country.

Company spokesman David Spartin said MBNA, based in Delaware, is hoping to get the green light and be operating in Spain by the third quarter of this year. Offices are planned in a suburb of Madrid.

And Spain will not be the last stop in Europe for MBNA.

“You’ll see us in other European countries in the future,” Spartin said Friday.Along with its offices in the United States, MBNA has expanded in recent years to Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland. Presently, the international market accounts for 7.5 million MBNA customers who account for $11 billion in loans, according to a statement released Thursday by the company.

MBNA has a 13 percent market share of credit-card loans in the United Kingdom and Ireland and a 7 percent share in Canada, according to the company. In the United States, the company claims 15 percent of the credit-card market.

Worldwide, MBNA is second only to Citibank in credit-card lending. Citibank is offering its credit cards in Europe, Spartin said.

“The Spanish market was studied for a long time” before the decision was made to seek to do business there, he said. There is a $40 billion market for credit-card and other unsecured loans in Spain, Spartin said.

Although Spain will be the first non-English-speaking country in which MBNA operates, its employees in Canada market to French-speaking Canadians. And at MBNA’s Fort Kent office, bilingual people are hired to assist customers on both sides of the border.

MBNA also announced that its profits for the first quarter of the year rose to $369 million, up from $311 million in the first three months of last year.

Total managed loans were at $95.4 billion on March 31.

Net interest income from loans in the first three months of the year was $513 million, up from $355 million in the first quarter of last year.

The company has set aside $359 million for possible credit losses, an increase from last year’s provision of $218 million. Managed loan losses were at 5 percent for the first quarter of this year, up from the first quarter of last year but down from a high of about 5.12 percent late last year, Spartin said.

The industry’s average default rate is 6.5 percent, he said.

MBNA added 2.4 million new customers – or 2.1 million new accounts – during the first quarter of 2002, according to the company statement.

Much of MBNA’s marketing efforts are done through what it calls affinity groups, organizations that endorse the use of MBNA’s credit card in exchange for a

portion of the interest income.

The company added 93 new endorsements in the first quarter, including Bass Pro Shops, Georgia State University, Rotary International (Canada), UPS Capital (Canada), the Boston Athletic Association and the Magic Johnson Foundation.

MBNA renewed contracts with more than 300 groups, including: Ducks Unlimited, The Retired Officers Association, Stanford Alumni Association and American Psychiatric Association.

In all, MBNA employs 28,000 people, Spartin said. Other U.S. offices are in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Georgia, Florida, Ohio, Texas and California.

Its Maine offices are in Fort Kent, Presque Isle, Farmington, Orono, Belfast, Camden, Rockland, Brunswick and Portland.