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A Look at Wells Fargo’s Check Card Rewards Program
By JLP | April 6, 2006
You may or may not know this but banks make more money off credit transactions than off debit transactions. The flipside is that retailers make more off debit transactions than credit transactions. Therefore, banks are coming up with “rewards” programs in order to encourage people to “sign” for their transactions. Today I’m going to look at Wells Fargo’s Rewards Program.
Wells Fargo has two rewards programs: Exclusive Rewards® and Enhanced Rewards. You can compare both side-by-side here. To keep things simple, I’ll only be discussing the Exclusive Rewards® program.
The Exclusive Rewards® program has a $12 annual fee unless you have a Portfolio Management Account (PMA) which requires a minimum of $25,000 combined banking, credit, or investment balance (they will also let you count 10% of your outstanding home mortgage balance). Why do they charge an annual fee? I have no idea.
What do you get for your fee?
For every $4 you spend, you get 1 point. The minimum required point level to qualify for the base reward (a $5 gift card) is 650 points (take a look at the Program Guide (PDF)). That means you have to sign for $2600 (650 X $4 = $2,600) to get back $5. Remember, these have to be SIGNED transactions, not debit transactions. Since my wife and I don’t have a PMA account with WF, we would have to spend over $6,240 BEFORE we would breakeven on the $12 annual fee. To top it off, you get back gift cards, not actual money.
I love how banks make these programs so confusing. I’m sure they do it on purpose. Next time, I’ll look at Citibank’s reward card. It’s a little better than this, but not much.
Topics: Credit Cards |