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by sabman83 3536 days ago
I don't think I need temporary numbers to protect me from fraud. The fraud protection with my current credit card has been working fine so far. Another reason not use this card is that I don't want to miss out on reward points. I don't see how this business model is going to survive.
3 comments

Rewards are hoops CC card companies make you jump though to get some of your money back. Money you pay when vendors increase their prices to cover CC card fees.
You pay the fees if you use this card, or indeed buy anything at all. So you'll want to get those rewards.
And you pay a fee to cover those rewards.
That's not really at the behest of the credit card company, as I understand it.
My Citi card gives me 2% cash back on everything. It's a 1 button operation.
What fee?
Yes, but opting out of rewards just leaves your money on the table.
Pedant rant/ That's not quite how pricing works. Firms will generally charge the highest price the market will bear. If the firm is already charging that price, demand decreases if the raise the price. Depending upon the price elasticity of demand, it may be a precipitous drop. The firm is more likely to just have diminished margins.
I don't know what credit card you have experienced this with, but with mine I just indicate that I want cash back in the form of statement credit and it's good to go. There are no hoops to jump through.
Consumers don't care about why things are the way they are.
This was my thought. I would love to use it, but I am not going to give up my SPG card from American Express. It gives me 1 point per purchase, but by saving those points for first class tickets, I have been netting out at 25 cents per point.

For instance, I just took a first class, round trip flight to Tokyo with my wife. The cost for each one way flight was a bit over $15k. So thats almost $60,000 in flights that I booked for 240k SPG points (transferred to AA with bonus, which then booked with Japan Airlines and Singapore Air). If I had used Final's 1% cashback program, I would have only received $2400.

Seems like a no brainer to skip out on the cooler features to get 25% more value from my purchases.

That's a lot of $1 purchases. Where are you buying that you make 240k purchases in a reasonable amount of time?
Woops, I meant 1 point per dollar spent.
Rewards tend to survive with virtual credit cards. They practically acts as a proxy. I am assuming itd be similar.
From their FAQ:

" Do you have rewards?

Yes - unlimited 1% cash back on every purchase.

The security and control benefits of Final go well beyond grocery points and miles, but we understand rewards are important.

So while it might not be the highest cash back rate available, our goal is to provide rewards that actually get used by our cardholders - and that means making it easy to redeem - two clicks easy."

So if you have a decent rewards card, you would be sacrificing quite a bit in rewards with this.