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This is another post in our Weird Wednesday series where we look at credit cards that you probably haven’t heard of before. More posts in this series are found here.
This week we are going to look at the Commerce Bank World Elite Mastercard. As the name suggests this card is issued by Commerce Bank which operates out of Columbus, Ohio. One interesting thing about this bank is that the majority of their cards offer rewards for every dollar in interest you pay. Personally I hate this practice as it encourages cardholders to pay interest (even when they are only getting pennies in the dollar in rewards). I’m sure all of my readers know that they should always pay their credit cards in full.
Contents
The Basics
- No sign up bonus
- Annual fee of $125 (not waived first year)
- EMV chip (unsure if it has PIN or only signature)
- No foreign transaction fees
- Mastercard world elite benefitsÂ
- 0% APR for 9 billing cycles
- Card earns at the following rates:
- 3x points for purchases made at participating travel retailers at the commercebank.com/rewards website
- 3x points for every dollar in interest you accrue on your monthly balance
- 3x points on rotating bill payments
- 2x points on all travel & restaurant purchases
- 2x on rotating categories
- 1x point on all other purchases
- 5% annual point dividend when you make $50,000 or more in purchases in a calendar year
- No points earning caps and points don’t expire for five years
- Airport lounge membership
Apart from the disgusting reward on interest earned, there are a few things of interest that we’ll look at more. The lounge access, the shopping portal (and 3x on some merchants there) and the 5% annual point dividend.
Shopping Portal
Like a lot of the major credit card issuers, Commerce Bank has their own shopping portal. Shopping portals are only as good as their rates, so below is a table of the Commerce Bank rates and the highest rate for that merchant according to cashbackmonitor.
| Commerce Bank | Highest Rate | |
|---|---|---|
| Sears | 5x | 7.00% |
| Priceline | 2x | 7.00% |
| Starbucks | 7x | 7.00% |
| Apple Store | 1x | 5.00% |
Commerce Bank only lets you view some of the rates they offer, but as you can see they never offered the best rate and their travel partner was 5% less so that cancels out any bonus you’d get there (remembering that some travel partners earn 3x).
Rotating Categories
Commerce bank also offer a weird set of rotating categories. You’ll earn 2x points on your credit card in these categories and 3x on your bill payments. Here are the categories for this year:
There is also a limit of 2,500 points that you can earn per quarter. I’m not sure how the bill payment system works, if you need a checking account attached or if they charge cash advance fees.
Lounge Access
Their marketing page states that this card comes with airport lounge membership upon application approval. If you read the fine print you’ll see that this is a LOUNGE CLUB membership and it doesn’t give you free access, in fact if you do access a club in their system your credit card will be automatically charged for the visit.
5% Annual Dividend
To receive the 5% annual dividend, you’ll need to spend $50,000 or more in a calendar year (January – December) and it will be awarded roughly 14 business days after the end of the calendar year. Given that this card only earns 3x in a few select categories I think the majority of people will struggle to spend anywhere close to $50,000 on this card.
If the rotating categories were 5x and had higher spending limits, this might be a different case but I can’t really see anybody spending that much on this card when the other options are so much better.
How Much Are Points Worth?
The Commerce Bank website say that points can be redeemed for “merchandise, gift cards, travel, cash back & more” and then directs you to commercebank.com/rewards. Unfortunately it’ll just show you a few items you can redeem points for and not how many points you need to redeem unless your logged in.
I searched online to see if anybody had shared their experiences with Commerce, but I came up with nothing. In general similar points have been valued at 1¢ or less.
Eligibility
This card is actually targeted at Commerce Bank’s private banking customers. It’s not actually possible to apply for this card online, so you’d need to visit one of their branches to apply. I imagine that they would also require you to be an existing Commerce Bank customer and hold significant assets with the bank to be eligible.
Final Thoughts
The fact this card has a $125 annual fee and no real benefits is a massive deal breaker for me, couple this with the fact that there is no sign up bonus and I can’t really see any reasons as to why you’d want to apply for this card. If points were extremely valuable or transferable to travel partners, then the 3x categories might be more attractive but as it stands it’s already possible to get 3x (or close to it) on all purchases.
I wish banks would stop rewarding bad behavior with rewards for paying interest, but I assume it’s very profitable for them to do so. If you have any ideas for credit cards that you’d like me to cover, just let me know or comment below.
Hat tip to solomonshv on myFICO for letting me know about this card.Â
The portal has been eliminated for roughly a year. They stopped offering rewards for interest thankfully.
They also changed their top two cards to have 1.5x on anything vs special connections or miles visa signature which have rotating 2x and 3x categories. Can only get a max of $100 on the 2x and 3x each year. Great for paying insurance!
Also its very difficult to get increases. They open the new card, toss in your old limit, and erase the old card from your report as if it wasn’t even there.
They do have recurring bt offers 1.99pct 12mos 5pct fee. Kinda steep.
Right now they are offering 5x in-store at CVS through April 29. In the past they have offered 10x at Starbucks, Subway, Barnes and Noble, and Kohls. As far as portal options, in addition to the 2x Priceline you mention they were offering 2x Hotwire, 3x Marriott, and 5x Radisson and Choice.
There is also a “regular” (no AF) version of this card that I’ve had for several years. It is not very good either, but I’m glad to finally see someone write about Commerce Bank – I’ve not seen anything in the blogs about the Commerce Bank card before this post. The regular version used to be more useful when it had no foreign transaction fee (raised to 1% and now 2%) and sporadic 5x categories. It recently got the same 2x and 3x categories mentioned above. I do think you’ve shortchanged the shopping portal a little – it can be pretty good, and combines elements of both portals and in-store deals a la Amex Offers or Bank Amerideals.
I’d love to include more information on the shopping portal, but unfortunately it’d only let me view some deals without signing in and obviously I wasn’t able to sign in. Can you give me some of the good portal rates they have and some of the in store deals? If so, I’ll happily include them. Always nice to actually hear from a cardholder that is familiar with the product.
Another super weird card that is not worth applying for, but thanks for the info, Will!
Yeah, it’s a shame that these cards are mostly crap. Although hopefully these reviews save others from having to dig into the product too much to realize it. Fingers crossed I find some gems soon!