Update 4/15/19: Sign up bonus is now 3% cash back on all purchases for the first year. Maximum of $10,000 in spend. Previously you received $150 for spending $2,500. You’re actually worse off than before with this new offer as you need to spend $10,000 to get the full $300 ‘bonus’. If you put that spend on a 2% card you would earn $200 so it’s an effective bonus of roughly $100. Alternatively under the old offer you could have spend $2,500 to trigger the $150 bonus and then put the remaining $7,500 on a 2% card. That would have earned you a total of $337.5
Update 10/23/18: Minimum spend requirement has increased from $500 to $2,500, making this offer significantly worse.
Update 02/14/18: They are no longer offering the 2% rate for the first six months
HSBC has launched a new credit card ‘HSBC Cash Rewards Mastercard‘. Let’s take a look in this quick review to see if it makes sense to apply.
Contents
Card Basics
- No annual fee
$150 sign up bonus after $500 or more in purchases within the first three months of account opening- 0% introductory APR on balance transfers for the first 15 months from account opening
2% cash back on all purchases made within the first 6 months from account opening, after that receive 1.5% cash back- 1.5% cash back on all purchases
- 10% anniversary bonus on all cash rewards earned each year
- No foreign transaction fees
Our Verdict
In terms of cash sign up bonuses, $150 isn’t terrible especially considering the minimum spend requirement is quite low. I’m not sure if you receive the 10% anniversary bonus on the sign up bonus as well (even after reading all the fine print), that would make the bonus $165 instead of $150. The card doesn’t make much sense for everyday spend even with the 10% bonus as it would be earning at a rate of 1.65% and there are much better cards out there for every day purchases.
For the majority of people there are much better sign up bonuses available, but if you’re already hitting limits with the other card issuers and you can make use of the 2.2% cash back for the first six months then the card could be useful. Obviously this depends on what sort of approval criteria HSBC has and what sort of credit limits they offer. If you have any information regarding HSBC and their credit cards, please let us know and we will do a dedicated post regarding them.
Hat tip to RedditWing7 on /r/churning
