A lot of wealth management companies offer exclusive credit cards to their high end customers, Merrill Lynch is no different. In addition to offering the Bank of America Preferred Rewards program they also offer the Merrill Lynch Octave credit card.
There isn’t a lot known about this card because it looks like it was only released sometime in November of 2014. Below is what we do know about this card.
Contents
Photos Of The Card
Like most high end cards, the Octave is black and made of metal. User ccorso from creditcardforum.com shared these pictures:
Octave Front
Octave Card Side View
Octave Box
Requirements To Get The Card
To be eligible for this card you need to have at minimum a Merrill Lynch account balance of $10,000,000 (ten million) dollars. You also need to be a Merrill Lynch Private Wealth Management or US Trust client.
Earning Points
According to trickless from Flyertalk this card earns 2.5x Merrill Points per $1 in spend. There are no category bonuses on this card or relationship bonuses. There is no limit to the amount of points you can earn.
Redeeming Points
Points never expire and you can redeem your points for gift cards, cash back, statement credit, to offset any purchase or for flight bookings. When redeeming for gift cards it looks like the points are worth 1¢, assuming that you can resell the gift cards for 90% of face value this would mean that the card earns 2.25% cash back or 2.5% if you can get the full value out of the gift cards.
When redeeming for cash back or statement credit points are worth 1¢ a piece as well, meaning that it’s not really worth it to redeem for gift cards (as it’s always possible to purchase these at some sort of discount. Even if you just use the Octave card you’d effectively be getting a 2.5% discount).
Your other option is to redeem your points for flights, when you do this points are worth up 2¢ a piece but you have to redeem a minimum of 25,000 points ($500 in flights) at a time. The value you get out of this option will depend on what airlines you redeem for:
- American Airlines, British Airways, Delta Airlines & United Airlines allow you to redeem 25,000 points for up to $500 in flights (2¢ in value)
- All other airlines allow you to redeem 30,000 points for up to $500 in flights (1.67¢ in value)
You’ll also earn frequent flyer miles and elite qualifying miles on these flights as well. If flights are under $500, you’ll still need to pay the minimum of 25,000 points. For flights over $500, you’ll only get a value of 1¢ a point (and this is done in increments of 2,500 points).
Card Benefits
This card has an annual fee of $950 and for that price tag you’d expect a lot of benefits to make it worthwhile. Here is what the card offers:
- $350 annual travel credit or Delta SkyClub Executive Membership
- $100 Global Entry Credit
- Save 20% off the base fare for up to two round trip coach tickets
- International business or first class savings
- Private Jet Program
- Airfare guardian program. Automatically monitors your flights for price drops.
- Premium airport concierge service.
People that have this card have reported that the 20% off discount is actually quite useful. You have to use their booking engine but it takes 20% off the lowest published fare.
Final Thoughts
At best this card would earn 5% everywhere, which is pretty impressive but chances are you wouldn’t have enough flights to get this value all of the time. Let’s try to be conservative and say points are worth 1¢ a piece and then let’s be generous and say you get $450 of value out of the card benefits. That leaves you with an annual fee of $500, if you compared this card to a 2% cash back card with no annual fee you’d need to spend $10,000 to recoup the annual fee costs.
I think it’s pretty reasonable to expect that somebody with $10,000,000 in assets would spend $10,000+ a year on their credit card. If you have the assets already invested with ML, I’d recommend this card. I certainly don’t think it’s worth moving that amount of money just for this card.
Do you have any experience with this card? If so, let me know in the comments.
Thanks to these posts/forum threads:
Does this card still exist? I thought it was replaced by the Merrill card
Pretty underwhelming for the high relationship requirement and annual fee.
Your math is wrong. One needs to spend $100,000 on this card to recoup the annual fee (compared to a 2% card).
$500/(.025-0.2)=$100,000
I would put it at $25,000. I think a baseline of 4% (by redeeming on flights) is very doable if you travel domestic.
Has this card replaced the Accolades card? Accolades was Merrill’s previous high-end card, but this card appears to be a different league and I was wondering if they still kept the Accolades card? As I recall, the requirements for the Accolades card were much less ($250k of assets).
I think the Accolades card is still available for sign up, but I can’t confirm as I don’t have any money with ME.
Accolades is not available for new applicants, it is grandfathered. The Merrill+ Visa originally replaced the Accolades AmEx. Neither the Accolades or Merrill+ are anywhere near the Octave card in quality or exclusivity.
Makes sense a card like this would have this rewards structure. You’re already Preferred Rewards giving 2.625% with the BOA trave rewardsl, you’d hope they could do better with another 9.9 million. I could imagine this would be a decent card to put taxes on as well.