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CitiBusiness ThankYou Card Review

This article was written by in Credit. 1 comment.


Citibank wants to lure more business owners away from American Express and Chase with a credit card that cribs from its competitors’ playbooks. Like the original Platinum Card, the CitiBusiness ThankYou Card streamlines expense reporting and adds significant purchase protection benefits. While its APR and rewards offers don’t stack up to Ink from Chase, strong service features could make the difference for professionals who don’t intend to carry a balance.

Small spending plateau triggers Citi’s signup bonus

According to Citi’s website, a new CitiBusiness ThankYou cardholder can trade their 15,000 bonus points for $150 in merchant gift cards after spending just $3,000 with the card over 90 days. New Chase Ink Cash members have to spend $5,000 to qualify for a bonus $150 cash rebate, but Chase also offers an extra $100 credit upon first purchase.

CitibankLike Chase, Citi offers its ThankYou members bonus points for purchases in a variety of rotating, seasonal categories. Qualifying purchases earn three ThankYou Points per dollar spent at eligible merchants that include computer stores, advertising companies, airlines, restaurants, and phone companies. You’ll earn one ThankYou Point for every dollar you spend elsewhere on the card. Citi also kicks in bonus rewards for managing your account online and registering for paperless statements.

Earning awards gets easier if you share your personal ThankYou balance

ThankYou points carry the most value when you redeem them for merchandise or for gift cards. For instance, at a penny per point, an Amazon.com gift card reward can let you earn the equivalent of a 3 percent rebate on featured category purchases. Because every employee using CitiBusiness cards earns points, your company’s balance can grow fast.

Chase and American Express both offer stronger redemption rates on their business rewards cards. However, Citi offers a feature that can make the ThankYou program more appealing. Carry both a CitiBusiness card and a personal Citi credit card, and the bank will let you swap points between your accounts at no charge. If you choose to keep all your points for yourself, merging your earnings can help you reach higher rewards levels faster.

Citi makes up for average account terms with extraordinary protection

At the moment, the CitiBusiness ThankYou Card offers a six month, no interest teaser, followed by an APR above 13 percent. There’s no balance transfer teaser in effect, either. With no annual fee and no charge for issuing employees their own cards, CitiBusiness makes a decent card for cash flow management. This card really shines for companies that take advantage of money-saving features, including:

  • Extended warranty. Add one year to the manufacturer’s standard warranty on each purchase.
  • Retail purchase protection. You’re covered for up to $10,000 in loss or damage for 90 days after each transaction.
  • Auto rental insurance. Never pay for a collision damage waiver again.
  • Travel accident insurance and assistance services. Automatic coverage, and a round-the-clock help desk to keep you safe.
  • While frequent flyers may prefer AmEx’s Platinum Card’s airport perks, the CitiBusiness ThankYou Card replicates many of its competitors’ most compelling benefits.

Personal Business Assistant

Concierge services have quickly become the must-have benefit for elite business credit cards. Citi skews the trend with its team of Personal Business Assistants, specialized service professionals who can perform high level tasks on behalf of companies instead of cardholders. Like other cards’ concierge desks, the Citi PBA team can book you a reservation at a hot restaurant or confirm your next travel itinerary.

These assistants add even more value by researching supplier costs, sourcing vendors, and handling more complex requests related to meetings and conferences. Issuing a CitiBusiness ThankYou Card to each employee on your team gives them the power to offload routine tasks and busywork via a secure, online portal. That could be the signature feature keeping this card in the competition for space in your wallet.

If the above features appeal to you, apply for a CitiBusiness ThankYou Card today to receive the 15,000 bonus points opportunity.

Photo: Kien Wai

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British Airways Visa Signature Card from Chase Review

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If you’ve ever flown British Airways long-haul from the U.S. to London, you’ve probably lingered when walking past those sleeper seats in the “Club World” section. They don’t just recline, they lay fully flat. You won’t run the risk of a small child kicking the back of your chair for hours before you endure the endless escalator rides at Heathrow. Thanks to this spring’s special offer from Chase’s British Airways Visa Signature Card, you can treat yourself to this luxury for about the same price as a standard coach class ticket.

Right now, Chase offers a staggered signup bonus for new British Airways Visa Signature cardholders. British Airways calls their frequent flyer miles “Avios,” and you’ll earn 50,000 of them as soon as you use your new Visa card. Make $10,000 in purchases, and BA credits your Executive Club account with 25,000 more Avios.

Land your final bonus of 25,000 more Avios once you’ve cleared $20,000 in purchases during your first year. After that, you can spend 80,000 Avios and about $1,100 in upgrade fees to book yourself that luxury flight.

Saving Avios and flying on the cheap

You don’t always have to splurge on a sleeper chair, though. Your 100,000 bonus Avios are plenty to cover the cost of two “World Traveller” round trip base fares between London and any of BA’s stateside hubs in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. This isn’t a discount airline you’re flying, either. British Airways’ coach seats on these flights resemble other airlines’ business classes. You get a private entertainment system, hot meals, and impeccable service from a flight crew that only gets testy if you don’t give them the chance to serve you.

The special smart chip you won’t see on other travel credit cards

Only a handful of American credit cards include the embedded smart chip that you’ll need to make routine purchases in Europe. Chase puts that “EMV chip” front and center on the British Airways Visa, and you’ll appreciate it when your travels take you off the beaten track. To combat fraud, many European merchants won’t accept American magnetic stripe credit cards outside of common tourist areas. The EMV chip saves you time and hassle, especially if you want to use any automated parking meters or vending machines during your visit.

No foreign transaction fee

Your $95 annual fee buys you another important perk that you’ll find on few travel rewards cards: no foreign transaction fee. Chase makes the process easy for frequent U.K. visitors: charge your card in pounds sterling at no extra fee, while enjoying Chase’s best currency conversion rate for the day of your purchase.

Rewards and risks of airline credit cards

Of course, British Airways is still a traditional airline, with a typical frequent flyer system. Regular BA travelers say that the 2012 Olympics and London’s business boom have made reward seats scarce, unless you plan your free trip far in advance. You’ll also have to pay redemption fees, airport service fees, and other taxes on each reward ticket.

If you value flexibility in a travel credit card, consider the Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card instead. You’ll earn as much as 2 percent back on your everyday purchases, in the form of statement credits that you can redeem against any of your travel expenses. Still, given the high price of transatlantic airfare, the British Airways Visa Signature offers tremendous value, if you’re willing to jump through a few hoops.

To take advantage of the 10,000 Avios offer, apply for the British Airways Visa Signature Card from Chase today. You will need excellent credit in order to be approved, and be aware of the $95 annual fee.

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Barclaycard Ring MasterCard Sets Its Features Through Crowdsourcing

This article was written by in Credit. 8 comments.

Barclaycard, a credit card issuer that primarily furnishes branded credit cards, like the Best Western Credit Card and the Carnival Credit Card, is experimenting with a new business model with a brand new card called Barclaycard Ring. I have to wonder if the “Ring” in the name of the credit card refers to a circus, because this may be the atmosphere Barclaycard is trying to create.

The Barclaycard Ring card is the first “social” credit card; the terms will be shaped by the community of credit cardholders. For almost nine years I’ve been sharing my financial reports each month and accepting feedback about and suggestions for my financial decisions from a community of readers, and Barclaycard is taking the same approach. Cardholders will be able to view the card’s profit and loss statements, offer suggestions to direct the future of the business, and share in the card’s profits.

CrowdCustomers will be encouraged to participate in the community, likely to take the form of a forum-based website, and with this participation, they’ll have the opportunity to take home part of the profits in the form of rewards. Through the openness of the business, customers will see the effect these decisions have on the card’s bottom line. By crowdsourcing some of the terms most relevant to generating profit, the community will decide which features the card may include. Here are a few aspects of the credit card offer customers will be able to affect:

  • Interest rates (currently 8% APR)
  • Balance transfer fees (currently $0)
  • Annual membership fee (currently $0)
  • Late fee (currently $25)
  • Foreign transaction fee (currently 1%)
  • Whether to outsource customer service
  • Specific deals with merchants
  • Marketing ideas
  • Web site features

Unlike most businesses, where customers feel they are better served when a company’s profits are narrow, this clever idea changes the perspective of customers. By giving the customers a role in designing the card, the community will have a feeling of ownership and responsibility. With this feeling, in addition to the possibility of sharing in the profits, customers who normally feel they are living in opposition to their credit card issuers will feel that they and Barclaycard are on the same team.

Barclaycard will share its profits with the community through a program the company is calling GiveBack. While shareholders are always the first priority, a standard calculation will determine how community participants share in the profits. While some portions of the Giveback program seem to be exempt from shaping by the community, users will have the option o directing some of this Giveback money to charities.

By giving cardholders the ability to share in the profits — more like a credit union than a typical financial institution — it’s easy to see why the low interest rates and low fees Barclaycard Ring currently offers might not be permanent. When revenue data are kept private and profit is only reinvested withing the company and distributed to its shareholders, card users benefit the most with low rates and low fees. Once customers see how higher rates and fees might benefit each individual or a community consisting of responsible credit card users who can avoid fees and interest rates by paying on time and in full, I don’t expect it to be long before the crowd votes to increase fees and rates.

Customers who participate in the community will begin thinking more like business owners than like consumers, eager to see profits climb, with the opportunity to boost their own bank account balance through the GiveBack rewards.

Photo: Photos By Mavis
ᔥ Barclaycard Ring

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Customers Say Retailers Are Not Living Up to Durbin Amendment Promise

This article was written by in Consumer. 14 comments.

Retailers, represented by the National Retail Foundation, promised that consumers would benefit when retailers, particularly small businesses, were to benefit from regulated interchange (swipe) fees charged by Visa and MasterCard. The regulation, commonly called the “Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank Act,” would lower the cost for businesses who were subject to an effective duopoly between Visa and MasterCard, paying a percentage of every debit card transaction to the processor.

These fees are higher for transactions with any card that is more than just vanilla, and retailers have dealt with this high cost of doing business in an age where an increasing number of transactions are handled electronically mainly by increasing the costs of products overall.

Cashier checkout at WalmartThe National Retail Federation claimed last year that consumers would see the benefit of reduced interchange fees. Regulated cards — and not every issuer is subject to this regulation — carry interchange fees with a maximum of 0.05% of the transaction plus $0.21. The standard fee for a non-regulated card (reviewing Visa’s schedule of interchange reimbursement fees as of October 2011 [pdf]) is 1.90% of the transaction plus $0.25 for every swipe of the card.

If retailers intended for the consumer to benefit, the only way for that to happen would be in the form of lower prices. Here are a few comments from representatives of the retail industry, as compiled by the Electronic Payments Coalition:

  • “The reform will save each franchisee in the country almost 50% of the cost of a debit transaction, which ultimately will be passed on to the customer… It is simply a fact that lower merchant costs will lead to lower consumer prices.” (Bruce Maples, Chairman, National Coalition of Associations of 7-Eleven Franchisees)
  • “Merchants are ready to pass lower swipe fees along to consumers in the form of discounts and other benefits as soon as reform goes into effect…” (Mallory Duncan of the National Retail Federation)
  • “Merchants are making a wide variety of plans to pass the savings along to customers who use debit cards, ranging from discounted prices to benefits and increased services such as free delivery at an appliance store…” (National Retail Federation press release)
  • “Secondly, to the extent that a merchant receives a benefit, I do believe that from a competitive standpoint, they will bring that through to the consumer.” (Robert Donovan, Corporate VP & U.S. Assistant Treasurer, McDonald’s

If you’ve been shopping throughout the past year, particularly since October 1, 2011 when the regulation went into effect, you probably haven’t noticed prices decreasing. In fact, I would say prices overall, from my anecdotal experience, have continued to rise. Recent research confirms this suspicion, to the tune of a 1.7% increase across a list of common items.

According to a consumer survey conducted by Ipsos Research, only 7% of consumers believe that retailers are passing these savings onto customers. 76% of retailers have increased their prices or kept them constant since October 1, 2011.

At the same time of these increases for customers, retailers have saved $2.28 billion as a result of the regulation. When we discussed this on Consumerism Commentary, most readers didn’t expect retailers to lower prices. Why should they? Small retailers have the opportunity to reduce their costs while not affecting revenue by keeping prices steady. That’s how businesses can survive in difficult times. Large retailers may have healthier profits due to volume, but the ability for large retailers to offer low prices is their strength, and don’t have the margins to reduce prices much.

Could it be possible that these promises of savings for the consumer were promoted by the industry to garner more public support for regulations?

Photo: Walmart Stores
Electronic Payments Coalition

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Local Currencies to Replace the Dollar in Communities

by Flexo
Dollar currency

It may be illegal for states to print money for commerce, but local communities have no such restriction from the federal government. And in some communities, local currencies have been successful, at least in gaining the support of some retailers and consumers. There’s no law of nature that says that an economy functions best when ... Continue reading this article…

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Free Shipping Day

by Flexo
Package Delivery

Today is Free Shipping Day, and thousands of online merchants are participating in this movement, offering free or reduced price shipping so customers have an opportunity to receive last-minute orders in time for the holidays. Free Shipping Day was founded by an entrepreneur-couple in December 2007 as a location for finding shipping discounts offered by ... Continue reading this article…

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The Best Online Checking Accounts, May 2012

by Flexo

As consumers grow increasingly frustrated by the checking account options offered by traditional banks, more are seeking out the best online checking accounts for better interest rates and service. Large banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America are continuing to add fees, such as debit card fees, and are not concerned with scaring the ... Continue reading this article…

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Citibank to Charge $20 a Month for Checking Account

by Flexo
Citi Checking Account Piggy Bank

For the last few years, savers have been punished by banks offering low interest rates. If that weren’t enough, banks now want depositors to pay for the privilege of putting money in a bank. In the world until recently, banks sought depositors because they used the public’s money to increase lending to borrowers who were ... Continue reading this article…

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