Credit card companies may be burning bridges with the millennial generation, according to a recently-released report from ID Analytics. The report discovered that for an average of 60 percent of millennials, those who are turned down for a credit card won’t apply again for at least a period of 12 months, and in some cases, it can go even longer.

The reasons are fairly standard—usually millennials applying for credit are turned down because of either low or no credit scores—though many of these millennials have current jobs and thus have income to repay a credit card with. This alone doesn’t mean so much, as it’s all fairly standard, but credit card companies may be doing themselves more harm than good.

A study from Bankrate.com notes that 63 percent of millennials already don’t have a credit card, and perhaps even worse, the ID Analytics study finds that they’re actually applying for credit at much higher rates than either of the two generations before them.

ID Analytics vice president of credit risk solutions Patrick Reemts commented “Without a complete picture of millennials’ credit, many financial services companies are turning away good consumers, and the bad news for financial institutions is that only 10 percent of millennials will reapply to the same lender once they have been declined.”

Here’s where the biggest problem kicks in; Reemts describes the conditions credit card companies are facing right now, and a simple extrapolation shows where this will end up. In 10 to 20 years, when millennials are top of the food chain in terms of disposable income, where will the credit card companies be? With payment methods on the rise, and reasons to have a credit card for anything other than a semi-permanent emergency loan vector on the decline, credit card companies may find themselves looking at greatly diminished business going forward.

While no one’s suggesting credit card companies take on a lot of sub-standard business—a lot of the 2008 financial crunch was caused by sub-prime mortgage lending—having a better understanding of millennial finances and opening up some lesser-risk lines of credit may be a smart idea. Failing to do so now may turn off an entire generation, and that’s a development card issuers may not be able to survive.