Wells Fargo Business Platinum Credit Card Review – $500 Sign Up Bonus (Branch Offer) & $1.5% Cash Back On All Purchases

Update 5/17/22: Reader IS250 tells us that the $500 offer is back in Wells Fargo branches with a $3,000 spend requirement. Online the offer is still down at $300.

Card Basics

Direct link to card

• No annual fee
• Card earns:
  • 1.5% for every $1 spent if you choose cash option
  • 1 point per $1 spent if choose point option. Point option also gives you 1,000 bonus points when you spend $1,000 in any monthly billing period. You get a 10% bonus when you redeem points online
• Credit limit of up to $50,000
• There is also a rewards fee, but that seems to always be waived under some sort of promotion
• Sign up bonus of $500 after $5,000 in spend within the first three months. Please note to receive this you must select the cash back option!
  • This offer is not available if the business already has a Wells Fargo business credit card or had a Wells Fargo business credit card opened or closed in the immediately preceding 12 months
  • The $500 Cash Back bonus will be automatically credited within three to five months after the spend requirement is met
• 0% introductory rate for nine months
• This card is not reported on your personal credit report, so it won’t affect your Chase 5/24 status.
• You can’t apply for this card online unless you have a checking account that has been opened for at least 12 months. Not sure if you can open in branch with the bonus or not.

 

How Much Are Points Worth?

You can see what you can redeem points for here, unfortunately it doesn’t show how many points are required. Robert did get this small sample:

Best value is 25,000 points for a ticket up to $400. That works out to be 1.6¢ per point.

Our Verdict

With the points earning card you could effectively earn 2x points per $1 spent if you spent exactly $1,000 each month. That would be worth up to 3.2¢ per $1 spent when redeeming for $400 in airfare and you could earn almost enough points every year. Seems like you can also transfer points from your personal cards to this card. Unfortunately you can’t get the sign up bonus when you do that and I suspect most people are much more interested in that.

Seems like a nice and juicy bonus and it looks like business cards aren’t on the same timeline as personal cards when it comes to sign up bonuses (this one says you’re not eligible if you’ve signed up with any other business card in the last 12 months and personal cards are on a 16 month timeline). I guess that maybe getting this card would make you ineligible for a personal card in the next 16 months, but I would be somewhat surprised if that is the case. Once we have some more datapoints I’ll add this to the best credit card bonuses. There is another the Wells Fargo Business Elite card that offers a sign up bonus of $1,000 but that requires over $1 million in sales.

Update: When applying there is no question asking if you want the cash back option. You have to do the following:

• Click Yes I want to Enroll in the Wells Fargo Business Card Rewards Program
• Click cashback program

Post history:

• Update 1/1/21: Deal has been reduced to $300 instead of $500.
• Update 7/7/20: Extended until December 31st, 2002. Spend is $5,000 instead of $3,000.
• Update 12/2/19: Deal has been extended until 06/30/2020. Some people have been having issues with conditionally approval.
• Update 10/1/19: Deal has been extended until December 31st, 2019.
• Update 7/2/19: Extended until September 30th, 2019.
• Update 4/1/19: Available again until June 30th, 2019. Looks like this will just be an ongoing offer now. Spend requirement has been reduced back to $3,000.
• Update 1/1/19: Available again until March 31st, 2019. Minimum spend requirement is now only $3,000 instead of $5,000.
• Now valid until December 31st, 2018.
• Update 07/05/18: Deal is back and valid until  9/30/18. Hat tip to reader Steve.
• Update 01/07/18. When I originally posted this, the $500 bonus was targeted. But there is now a public bonus so we are reposting and have updated the site.
• A few days ago reader @RobertDwyer tagged me in a post on Twitter, he had received an offer of $500 after $5,000 in spend on the Wells Fargo Business Platinum Credit Card. The offer is now available to everybody because of that the card itself is worth a short review in case others are targeted either now or in the future.