Devaluation with Capital One Aspire Cash Platinum MasterCard

Many of us were quite unhappy when the MBNA Smart Cash Platinum Plus MasterCard dropped their gas and groceries return from 3% to 2%. Now, Capital One is following MBNA’s lead. Capital One Canada has been one of my favourite institutions, namely because of the Capital One Aspire Travel World MasterCard. That is probably one of my favourite cards.

However, in a sneaky move, they downgraded the Capital One Aspire Cash Platinum MasterCard. They have already eliminated Capital One Aspire Cash World MasterCard that had a 1.5% cash back on all purchases, $100 sign up bonus and no annual fee. Now they downgraded the Capital One Aspire Cash Platinum MasterCard to 1% instead of 1.25%. They actually also took away the $50 sign up bonus on the Capital One Aspire Cash Platinum MasterCard a few months ago too. That’s essentially 3 downgrades in the past 3-4 months.

I don’t understand why the trend is going in reverse. Whenever a financial institutions downgrades a product, I always worry that there will be a chain reaction that will affect their other products. This is making worried that a devaluation will hit my Capital One Aspire Travel World.

It looks like the MBNA Smart Cash Platinum Plus MasterCard just moved up the list for arguable the top no annual fee cash back credit card in Canada.

MBNA’s downgrade was Capital One’s chance to take market share from other institutions. Instead, they just gave up their advantage. Since I have a personal interest in Capital One, because I have one of their products, I will give Capital One the benefit of the doubt and hope that they are coming out with a superior product to replace what they have cancelled and downgraded.