Citizen’s Bank & Charter One Eliminate Their 5% Cash Back & 25¢ Transaction Cards And Replace With Two New Cards

Citizen’s Bank & Charter One are the same bank but they operate in different areas under the two names. They used to offer two cards that were of potential interest:

• Green$ense Platinum MasterCard: This card earned 25¢ per transaction
• CashBack Platinum Mastercard: This card earned 5% cash back on gas and grocery stores (and often came with 10% cash back on one of those categories)

They also offered Platinum Mastercard which just came with no annual fee, no BT fee and an introductory APR of 0%.

New Cards

All three of these cards have now been removed from the official websites and been replaced by two new cards. Here are the details of these cards:

• Citizens Bank/Charter One Cash Back Plus World MasterCard:
  • Earn 1.5% cash back on all transactions (and up to 1.8% with the below bonuses)
  • 10% purchase bonus on earned cash back when you make at least one purchase every month for six months
  • 10% relationship bonus on earned cash back when you deposit it into Citizens Bank/Charter One personal checking, savings or money market account
  • 0% Introductory APR for 12 billing cycles
  • No annual fee
• Clear Value Master Card Citizens Bank/Charter One Clear Value MasterCard
  • No annual fee
  • 0% Introductory APR for 12 billing cycles

Final Thoughts

These changes are extremely disappointing, two of the old cards both had uses and were at least worth considering applying for. These two new cards are worthless, 1.8% cash back is much less than what other cards offer on all purchases and to get that full 1.8% rate there are strings attached.

Personally I see absolutely no reason to consider either of these two cards. Hopefully Charter One/Citizen’s Bank come up with something better in the future. This is yet another example of how the noose is tightening on 5% cash back cards.

Hat tip to reader XP1