At the end of last year, Bilt sent a letter to customers teasing some of their visions for the future of the program and the Bilt Mastercard. Then, earlier this week, they announced that cardholders would soon be receiving a survey on the topic. Now that said survey has arrived, it’s revealing some intriguing insight into where Bilt’s head is when evolving its product.
The biggest change on the table is the addition of mortgage payments to the credit card product. This would allow customers to earn 1x on housing payments regardless of whether they rent or own. However, lest you think this feature would simply be added to the current product, the bulk of the survey had cardholders sharing feedback on some proposed card options.
Notably, the survey asked customers to compare two sample card options at three different annual fee tiers (for a total of six cards). This includes cards with no annual fee, a $95 fee, and a $550 fee. While I won’t get into what each of these example products featured, some recurring themes included:
- Elevated rewards for:
- Bilt Neighborhood Dining
- Walgreens
- Lyft
- Reward category additions for:
- Gas
- Grocery
- Direct flight bookings (premium cards only)
- Credits on annual fee cards such as:
- Bilt Travel hotels/Bilt hotels (nomenclature varied between products)
- Bilt Fitness
- Walgreens
As for which proposed product option I found myself preferring, my pick ended up being one of the suggested $95 annual fee cards. Between the $50 Bilt hotel credit and $60 Walgreens credit pitched, I feel as though I’d have the annual fee covered by the benefits — although I suspect at least the Walgreens one would be $5 monthly, which could be annoying. Meanwhile, the rewards parts were kind of a toss-up for me as neither was really that exciting.
Speaking of rewards, looking at the options presented, I found that many would be pretty much moot in my current credit card strategy. Moreover, in my opinion, I’m not sure any of the mock-ups are better or even equal to the current Bilt card. Specifically, it’s odd that many of these options seem to want to emphasize Bilt Neighborhood Dining while downgrading generic dining.
Of course, just because Bilt is asking customers about specific card options doesn’t mean that we’ll see any of these exact products come to market. Instead, I think these A-B tests will give them some broader ideas that they can then refine later. And, even if they do choose to run with one of the cards presented for voting, I also don’t expect that this will be a simple “majority rules” situation. I also reckon it’s possible we could see more than one tier of Bilt card available when all is said and done (like a no annual fee version and then a paid one).
I’ll also point out that there are still plenty of things we don’t know beyond the list of potential rewards and benefits. For example, while Bilt currently requires customers to make at least 5 transactions with their card per month in order to earn points on rent, is it possible that this would change depending on the product? I could see this provision being dropped with the high annual fee card, while the “free” version might adopt something more aggressive — like how the Mesa card only awards points on mortgage payments if customers also make at least $1,000 in purchases on the card in a given month. Such details were left out of Bilt’s pitch, so it’s really anybody’s guess.
Ultimately, as interesting and potentially exciting as this is, I imagine we’re still quite a bit away from any overhaul taking effect. Regardless, as both a beat writer and a cardholder myself, I’m really looking forward to seeing how things play out in the months ahead.