Earn An Extra 1%-0.1% Cash Back On All Credit Card Transactions With Great Bridge Group Review

Update: Great Bridge Group has shut their doors, they will be reopening under a different brand soon.

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Great Bridge Group markets themselves as a “consumer insights company”, which in layman’s terms is a market research company. They compile information on consumers spending habits via credit and debit cards and then resell this information to make a profit. To encourage consumers to sign up they offer them a cash reward.

How It Works

You need to be invited to partake in great bridge group.

• Enter your age, zipcode and gender
• Wait to be invited
• Receive invitation
• Add cards to your account
• Use your debit/credit cards as normal and receive cash back
• Cash back is received either via Paypal or Amazon, you also have the choice to donate it to charity
• Great bridge group then compiles your spending habbits and then aggregates them with the other spending habits of members and sells this information with all personally identifiable stripped out to other market research groups
• This data is used by other market research groups to better understand what products people are purchasing, when and why. This can be used to better place up sell products (e.g noticing a trend that people always purchase cups with beer or crackers with cheese) and other marketing tactics.

[Read: How Great Bridge Group Makes Money]

How Much You Get Paid

The amount you get paid depends on when you joined the great bridge group:

• First group (beta users, joined before February, 2013): 1% on all purchases, up to a maximum of $70 per quarter
• Second group (joined February, 2013 – May, 2013) : 0.25% on all purchases, up to a maximum of $60 per quarter
• Current group (May, 2013 onwards): 0.1% on all purchases, up to a maximum of $60 per quarter

There seems to be a limit of $1,000 per purchase. E.g if you make a $2,000 purchase you’ll only be paid the cash back on the first $1,000 ($10 for the first group, $2.5 for the second and $1 for the current). You can also earn additional money by completing surveys.

You can also earn money through their referral program:

• $5 per referral that is accepted into the program and remains active for at least 90 days. The person being referred also receives $5.

Referral earnings are NOT included in the maximum you can earn per quarter. This means if you earn $60 via the cash back program and refer 10 people you’ll earn a total of $110.

Purchases Not Counted

A lot of the regular manufactured spending techniques/purchases will not count towards your cash back totals. We’ve confirmed the following will not work:

• Amazon payments

If you do other manufactured spending techniques, you are at risk of having your shut down. There are multiple reports of shutdowns: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22

Proof Of Payment

Payments are sent out every 90 days either by Paypal or Amazon, or donate directly to a charity of your choosing (you don’t pay fees on any of these methods). Lots of people have been paid via the great bridge group. We’ve included a few of these stories below to proof that this site is legitimate.

• The following people have all receive payouts from GBG: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41
• The following people have reported issues with receiving payouts from GBG: None

Security Concerns

Read their full security page

Great bridge group makes a number of claims about the security of their site:

• Bank level security
• No stored data (names, addresses or account numbers)
• No marketing and no spam

But they will sell your data to market research groups, they’ll do so in aggregate and there will be no personally identifiable data included with the data they sell. They’ve been in business since early December, 2012.

Great bridge uses Yodlee as their back-end for collecting this credit card data. This is the same backend that is used by the following companies: five of the top ten US banks, paypal, scottrade, amazon.com, fidelity investments. So the risk of data theft should be relatively low.

Getting Invited To Great Bridge Group

At the moment there is a long wait list to get into the great bridge group program. Here are some tips for getting in:

• Use a referral link. It looks like people who are referred are being given preference at the moment.
• Be a desirable market demographic. Like most of these programs there are a lot of people signing up from the same market demographic (usually poor college age students). If you’re not part of this demographic you’re more likely to be approved, but obviously this isn’t something you can change.

Our Verdict

This is a pretty easy way to earn a little bit extra on your credit card purchases. Unfortunately the earn rate of 0.1% that is currently being offered is so low that you’d need to spend $240,000 per year on credit card or debit card purchases to receive the full $240 per year on offer. This simply isn’t going to be achievable for most card holders. This is especially true when you consider that you’ll be booted out of the great bridge group if you put through any manufactured spending on enrolled credit cards.

Personally I won’t be signing up as I don’t think the security and privacy risk is worth it at 0.1% extra cash back. If it was at 0.25%+ I’d probably change my mind as the risk is pretty minimal. Another reason I’m not partaking is because I love to manufacture credit card spend and I’d be worried doing this as it leads to account shut downs on great bridge group. They could also resell this information, making it easier for card issuers to see what purchases I’m making (and making it easier for them to identify manufactured spend opportunities and shut them down).

Will you be joining the waiting list for the great bridge group? Is it worth the slight security risk to you? Let us know in the comments.

Other programs that allow you to earn additional points/cash back on purchases:

• Shopkick review
• Plink review
• Visa savings edge review
• AmEx open savings review
• Mastercard easy savings review

Hat tip to Fat Wallet Finance