* gives you cash back immediately after transaction
* and has no foreign transaction fees
* and has no late fees
* and has no annual fee
* and conveniently shows you the location of the transaction
* and has one click access to support via iMessage
It's a pretty nice package of features. Sure, it's not the highest cash back ever, but most people don't have time to be on HN and nerd out over credit card terms all day and this is great card for those people. I really hope they expand to more countries.
Credit cards are less of a thing in the uk. Cash back isn’t so common or so large because the merchant fees are much lower so there’s nowhere for the cash to come from. People also (as far as I’m aware) don’t buy as much on credit as they do in the US and they don’t accrue as interest on that debt either.
So a lot of these points are different between the US and UK (eg 1% cashback is quite a lot), and there aren’t a great number of UK credit cards that do have an annual fee (and if they do it is small).
Having no forex fee (and good exchange rates) tends to be a loss-leader for some cards in the UK (until they become known as a very cheap way to change money and start losing more and more on it).
Lots of credit-card related features (eg regarding late fees) matter less because a lot of the competition isn’t with credit cards but with debit cards (but then again banks tend to charge steep overdraft fees).
Contactless, a nice app, merchant location, and a messaging system for customer support is pretty common (for offerings like those mentioned by the GP). Messaging turns out to be a great interface because:
- the app can help guess what you want in common cases (eg moving house)
- it’s asynchronous so no one is wasting time on hold if it’s busy
- it’s text so automated systems stand a better chance of getting good quality data (like the new address) and guessing what the query is
Cards/bank accounts with fancy apps have been becoming a thing in the uk for perhaps 6-7 years and they’ve been becoming a bigger popular widely used thing in the past 3-5 years. So lots of these features can seem quite familiar to people.
* gives you cash back immediately after transaction
* and has no foreign transaction fees
* and has no late fees
* and has no annual fee
* and conveniently shows you the location of the transaction
* and has one click access to support via iMessage
It's a pretty nice package of features. Sure, it's not the highest cash back ever, but most people don't have time to be on HN and nerd out over credit card terms all day and this is great card for those people. I really hope they expand to more countries.