More appealing credit card offers (and a trip around the world), with Chris Hutchins
The current credit card landscape glitters with options for the consumer - different rewards can be earned at different rates in different ways, sometimes countered by an annual fee and sometimes not, and wrapped in countless different brands and colours.
Chances are, there’s a product out there that is perfect for every consumer.
Chances are, it’s bloody hard to find.
And that’s not just bad for consumers. When the water is murky, even the best bait may go unnoticed, and there may be many well-designed credit cards sitting on the shelf because the consumers simply didn’t understand the offering. That’s where Chris Hutchins comes in. In his own podcast, All The Hacks, Chris gets deep into the weeds matching consumers to credit card offers with an understanding of the market that can benefit both sides.
In this episode, we talk about Chris’ life of travel and startup adventures, about life hacking, and about how to design a better fit between card offers and card users.
All The Hacks is not just a great listen, it can save you money and improve your life, so seek it out on any of the major podcast platforms, or listen on its home page here: https://www.allthehacks.com/
You can find my research on first card in wallet on my LinkedIn profile over here https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/younger-consumers-seeking-out-credit-cards-clear-value-le-grange/ or at https://www.transunion.hk/resources/transunion-hk/doc/insights/Insights-On-Being-First-Card-In-Wallet.pdf and https://www.transunion.hk/resources/transunion-hk/doc/insights/Insights-Getting-In-Early.pdf
As you can see, I love first card in wallet analysis, so if your credit bureau won’t talk to you about it, reach out to me and we’ll see if we can get something going!
If you want to start your own Laid Off Camp - here’s the wiki Chris mentioned to get you going http://wiki.laidoffcamp.com/w/page/14510849/FrontPage (and it’s a great idea for this economy, because if I think back to my own MBA thesis, there’s a momentary spike in entrepreneurial activity post layoff but that drops with as unemployment persists, so we really only have a narrow window to make it work).
The episode with Elena Botella that was mentioned can be found here: https://www.howtolendmoneytostrangers.show/episodes/episode-68
You can learn more about myself, Brendan le Grange, on my LinkedIn page (feel free to connect), my action-adventure novels are on Amazon, some versions even for free, and my work with ConfirmU and our gamified psychometric scores is at https://confirmu.com/ and on episode 24 of this very show https://www.howtolendmoneytostrangers.show/episodes/episode-24
If you have any feedback, questions, or if you would like to participate in the show, please feel free to reach out to me via the contact page on this site.
Oh, and if you’d like more banking podcasts to check out, I’ve found a lot at: https://blog.feedspot.com/banking_podcasts/
Keep well,
Brendan
The full written transcript, with timestamps, is below:
Chris Hutchins 0:00
There's just so many nuances to every single credit card. What is the interest rate? Does it have an annual fee? What credit score do you need? What perks does it have?
I think it's not an ideal outcome for the consumer, however, because it's complicated, the more informed you are, the more you're able to, I guess, take advantage of what's out there. Whenever there's information asymmetry, if you have the information, you can actually end up better.
So yes, it's complicated. But if I can help people learn how the system works, I can help them fight back.
Brendan Le Grange 0:39
Earlier this week, I was in London for TransUnion's Financial Services Summit. It's an event that holds a special place in my heart, and indeed in my career: presenting research at the 2019 edition was my last act for the Hong Kong team, just as presenting at the 2021 edition, then still virtual, was my last act as a TransUnion employee overall. And as a guest, it was an equally valuable experience. Albeit after seeing so many old friends, I had a slightly rough start to the next morning.
But let's go back to that event in Hong Kong. There, my boss and friend, Charlie Wise, presented my favourite piece of research I've ever done. It was a study born out of an earlier mistake, in a way. You see, I had previously been asked by clients to look in the data for drivers of market share and, long story short, I'd come to the conclusion like many before me, that if you wanted a bigger share of total credit card spend, you needed a bigger share of total credit card limits.
But then I realised something.
Measuring market share at a total level is for schlubs. It's something I've always done, maybe because I'd come from big banks where it does kind of make sense, but when you get down to it, market share is for sale. If you want to be the biggest credit card in the market, you can be... for a price. What money can't so easily buy, is the title of first card in wallet. And that's what my study was about. I had recognised that one of the credit bureaus greatest data assets is the fact that they can see which credit cards coexist in any one wallet. And that's really where the action happens.
So, some context quickly. In Hong Kong, if you have a credit card, you probably have four or five in your wallet. In a four card wallet, the favoured card got 75% of all spend on average, the second card in the hierarchy got 15%, while cards three and four are fighting on the ground under the table for scraps. So if you genuinely want to grow your card spend or your card balances, you could spend billions to get your card into five times as many people's wallets (often generating very little down in third or fourth place). Or you could focus on moving the cards you already have out there, up their hierarchy - leveraging all the benefits of already having established that client relationship.
And how do you do that? Well, it's not through credit limit increases. If you don't keep your limit in line with a competition, you may fall down the hierarchy but that's not how you climb. To climb, you need a better product offering. It could be air miles, it could be cashback, it could be a low annual fee. In fact, today, it could be just about anything - which is why I'm speaking to Chris Hutchins, host of All The |Hacks, one of America's favourite podcasts and an expert on what makes a credit card offering attractive in today's marketplace.
Welcome to How to Lend Money to Strangers with Brendan Le Grange.
Chris Hutchins, host of All The Hacks, welcome to my little show. I'm just back from a holiday in South Africa, which I mentioned now, well, because everyone listening should visit if they haven't, but also because a trip to South Africa marked a pivotal moment in your own life. So let's change things from my normal structure here and start the episode by placing you in the aeroplane flying south, sitting next to your wif - what are you doing and how did you get there?
Chris Hutchins 4:19
Well, first off, thank you for having me. I haven't travelled like I travelled in that story, so you're bringing back really fun memories. You'll learn through this conversation that I'm a bit of an optimizer. So the trip to South Africa was maybe the most convoluted path I've ever taken. We lived in San Francisco and we wanted to get to South Africa, so we flew from San Francisco to DC where my family was, we said hi, then we took a bus up to New York, we flew from JFK to Cairo, we flew from Cairo to Khartoum, in Sudan, we flew from Khartoum to Nairobi, and then Nairobi to Johannesburg.
And so we land in Johannesburg with no agenda. We had no hotel we had no plan. We had nothing. My wife was done with a company that she didn't like working for. And she was ready to move on. And I was doing some freelance work. And we thought we should probably just take a trip. And one thing led to another and we went down this path of let's just take a long extended trip where we basically sell everything, move out of our apartment, pack two backpacks and see what happens. So we landed Johannesburg...
And the first thing I do is I get a local SIM card and I call the one friend I know in South Africa, who's in Cape Town, and I said, 'okay, we're here, what should we do?' And he's like, well, you don't want to stay in Johannesburg, you should come to Cape Town, you've got to come to Cape Town right now. So I said, 'okay'. So I go to look, I try to buy a ticket to Cape Town and, for whatever reason, they're completely sold out. So we flew then, after all those flights, we flew from Johannesburg to Durban and then Durban to Cape Town!
It was the the kickoff to what ended up being a seven and a half month overland backpacking trip with no agenda, other than to keep the budget under $30 a day.
Brendan Le Grange 5:54
A life changing trip, I'm sure. But tell me, before you took this grand adventure, what was your career like, what was your life like, leading up to that point?
Chris Hutchins 6:04
When I graduated college about, let's say, six months before, I didn't know you were supposed to get a job before you graduated. I went to a state school in Colorado, no one ever kind of told me, 'oh, you need the job, you know, far enough in advance'. And so I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I didn't have time to figure it out. I just said, 'what's the best job you can get out of college' and people said, 'oh, investment banking and management consulting'.
So I applied for a bunch of jobs and ended up getting a job at an investment bank and a management consulting firm.
One of the jobs started nine months after graduation - I accepted both. I just did one and I thought I had a nine month option. And at the end of nine months, I was like an investment banking isn't for me, let's take management consulting, you know. So I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I liked solving problems. I liked learning. And those two careers afforded me that opportunity, but those careers are really poor options for people who, I would say, have that entrepreneurial itch. You get to a company and you're like, oh, I have a really big idea. And it's like, well, we're not looking for you to do a big idea, we're looking for you to make this spreadsheet or this presentation or something like that.
Brendan Le Grange 7:06
And two careers that don't famously leave you much time in the afternoons or the evenings to think about other things as well, I imagine.
Chris Hutchins 7:14
Not at all.
And then I went to this event called Startup Weekend, it was a bunch of engineers, designers, everyone just trying to create companies over the weekend. We built some silly product that was a Windows app that would remind you to stretch. But like, in two days, we built a piece of software, we shipped it, and we had people that weren't just our parents and our friends and our family using it. And I was like, 'oh my gosh, like, this is a career. Where can I do this'? And everyone was like, 'you got to do go to San Francisco. That's where all the startups are being built right now'.
This was 2007 - 2008. And I was like, 'okay, that's it'. I go to my company and I say, 'I would love to move to San Francisco', they had an office there, and they said, 'okay, we'll move you out there, no problem'. I move out there, October 2008.
And then, as soon as I get there, about a month later, they're like, 'thank you for moving out here. We no longer have a job for you'.
And I was jobless trying to figure out what to do in this new city. And you know, I wanted to be there but I wanted a salary to pay the rent also! I was trying to figure out what to do, and I was like, 'there's so many smart people in the city, how do I just learn from all of them? How could some of the skills I know help other people and vice versa'. And so I had this crazy idea to start a conference for people who had been laid off, or who were freelancing and just didn't have traditional employment. And we call it Laid Off Camp. It was completely volunteer driven. No one made any money, but we ended up doing a huge event in San Francisco that got a lot of press, and I put up a wiki and was like, if you want to do on your event, here's the email I sent to sponsors, here's the schedule, here's how I did everything. And I ended up helping, you know, a handful of people put on events around the country. And There ended up being 20 or 30 Laid Off Camps all around the country for the next year, maybe a couple in Canada, but it didn't make money, but I learned from the sponsors I had, about a few opportunities to do some freelance work.
Brendan Le Grange 8:58
You started getting more into the startup space. When did that really convert into full on business startups? Was that before or after you took that big trip?
Chris Hutchins 9:10
So I'd started working with these companies and realised, like, this is what I want to do. I want to work with these guys. I want to build startups. I want to build companies from scratch with software. However, my wife was kind of stressed out with her job, and I had these three consulting projects that all ended at the same time. And we said, well, maybe before I go all in, let's take a trip.
We put this map on the wall, like an actual physical map, and we got pushpins, and we said, 'where should we go'?
And we each had some pins, and we started putting them in. And by the end, we were like, 'this is a lot of places'. And I started doing research. And I've never even thought about the fact that you could take a very extended trip, you could you know, pack your bags, and the budget you need - I think we each spent about $7,000 each for seven and a half months. And I know there are lots of people listening where $7,000 is a lot, but there's also a lot of people who are, like, I planned a trip for three weeks that was $7,000.
That trip was, I would say, a very pivotal moment for me. Because travelling around the world really showed me a lesson that I didn't know existed, which was: everyone in the world does things differently, and it works.
We spent about two months in Africa, two months in the Middle East, a month in India, and two months in Southeast Asia. And in those places, people live very different, yet very similar lives. You know, they're all happy, there's family, there's food, there's the common things, but the way you live, the way you operate, the way you communicate the way you walk and get around, it's very different in different places. And it still works. And I think I realised, gosh, I should never assume that the way I'm doing something is the most optimal way because I've now been exposed to so many other ways that are optimal for other people. And that really turned me into a kind of a little bit of a crazy optimizer in terms of trying to find ideal outcomes, be it for business or personal or anything.
Brendan Le Grange 10:56
That talent you've got for optimising is obviously now being reflected in your podcast, All The Hacks, you're now making a career out of helping other people to navigate the complex world of points and miles to upgrade their life, their money, and their travel, I think is your your tagline. So talk to me a little bit about your show, and how you got from being really good at optimising for yourself into making a podcast out of that.
Chris Hutchins 11:23
Ever since that trip, I've kind of had this 'there has to be another way' philosophy. And then, when that expanded to other things, it just kind of became how I operated. So if someone said, 'oh, how are we going to, you know, everything for raise our kids, to buy a car, to live on our home', I just thought maybe there's another way.
So I didn't know there was a house hacking movement, but when we bought our first house, we saw this house that had three bedrooms, and one of them had its own door to the exterior - and immediately we were like, 'oh, great, we can buy a three bedroom house, which we couldn't necessarily afford, but we could rent out one room, lock it off to the house as a studio that would offset the mortgage'. And then in five years, if we wanted to start a family, we could just not have a tenant, hopefully we could afford it more by then. And now we wouldn't have to go buy a new house. And like these things of just looking at everything from a different way and trying to understand how it might work.
I think somewhere during the pandemic, I had a handful of friends say, 'hey, every time we have dinner, you're sharing these like crazy, unique little angles you're taking. But we haven't had dinner last year, because nobody's really out having dinner, you know, can we just do a Zoom call, and you could just share whatever you've learned, there's got to be some hacks you've been figuring out'. And I thought maybe I should just record things for people. You know, there's a company called Loom, which lets you record your screen and your voice and I become a big fan of it. And I thought, Oh, what if I just record this - I have a microphone, maybe I'll just start a podcast.
And maybe I'll not only share the things I love, but I'll just I'll go learn more of them. Because now I have this excuse to go ask the smartest, most interesting people in the world, how they optimised various aspects of their life, things that I haven't figured out.
So I started recording a few and sending it around. And next thing I knew there were you know, hundreds of 1,000s of people listening to this podcast, and I thought, 'okay, well, this is my thing'. Right now, it's about a third, travel points and miles; it's about a third money, both deals and savings and kind of different hacks there, but also just investing for the long term; and then the rest is life, career negotiating, family relationships, happiness, everything else.
And so each week we interview interesting people, or I do an episode myself.
Brendan Le Grange 13:28
Now in that show, obviously, All The Hacks, you are focused on helping consumers to optimise their lives. Today, I'm going to mainly talk about credit cards. So you've got a lot of consumers in there asking for help in what is the best credit card for them to choose? Or how to use their wallet full of credit cards to their best advantage? It leaves me wondering for my audience, who are issuing credit cards, is its message getting through to the customers out there? Do you think it is maybe a problem that someone like you is needed to really wade through this and tell somebody what's right for them?
Chris Hutchins 14:01
It's funny, I thought, a couple of weeks ago, I was like, You know what, what if I could just build an algorithm so that I don't have to constantly try to understand what the best thing is now, with the latest offerings, it could just sort through all the cards automatically. And I was like, Okay, this should be easy, right? It should be easy to just rank order cards. And if you had some preferences, do it more efficiently.
And then I went down this path. I was like, man, there's just so many nuances to every single credit card. What is the interest rate? Does it have an annual fee? You know, what credit score? Do you need to be eligible for it? What perks does it have? You know, what credits do they offer to try to offset that fee? But not just what did the credits offer but what can you use them for - there might be a travel credit, and with one card, it's just spend money on travel and we'll reimburse you, but the other card, you have to go book in their portal, but they don't support all the airlines so you can book flights, but not all the flights. And it can be complicated.
And I thought gosh, I don't know if I can make this algorithm. I'm still thinking about how I could do it and how to value points versus credits and those kinds of things. But I think it's not an ideal outcome for the consumer.
However, I think that because it's complicated, the more informed you are, the more you're able to, I guess, take advantage of what's out there. You know, whenever there's information asymmetry, it's like, if you have the information, you can actually end up better. So I tend to think, yes, it's complicated, but if I can help people learn how the system works, and what is actually ideal for them, or for people like them, I can help them fight back against a system that is trying to, in some ways, maybe be a little bit - 'misleading' is maybe the wrong word, but like lead with one benefit, and try to capture you with something that maybe isn't as beneficial, like, this is the best card for x but oh, yeah, it actually has a really high interest rate so maybe it's not good. They're not going to tell you 'oh, it's not good for you, if you're this person'.
Brendan Le Grange 15:57
Yeah, there's that question of how much duty is there for you to fully explain the downsides, and an episode that will come up probably just before yours, with Elena Botella, who's written a book on the lending industry, and one of the exercises she encourages is to vocalise the worst aspects of your product (and to think if you can live with that).
I don't know, from the work that you're doing and finding out from customers out there what are they misunderstanding? Or what are they not getting? Do you think there is a way that the industry can get better at communicating these programmes and the the pros and cons of their their products?
Chris Hutchins 16:28
This idea of trying to win the primary card is even harder, because I can carry around, you know, 15 cards on my phone, and I don't even need a big wallet.
But to your question, it might come at the expense of corporate profit, which I think is always a hard thing to come up against. So, you know, a great example to me is in the US, if you fly United Airlines, the United Airlines card will give you 2 points, 2 United Miles, per dollar you spend on United, but the Chase Sapphire Reserve card will give you 3 Chase points that you can convert 1:1 into United points. So while it seems to the average consumer, like, gosh, I'm going to spend a lot on United, of course, the best credit card for me is the United credit card, how could it not be, it's like they're designing and marketing this card just for me. And in this one particular case, it's actually not the best card for you.
Now, I tend to say though, my rule of thumb is all of these airline cards are great for the benefits that come with them, the free check bags, the maybe priority boarding all those kinds of things. But beyond the perks, you really need to actually look in to find out is spending money on this card, actually the most ideal thing to do. And it's hard, you know, for, for banks to make it more and more transparent. And I don't think they're doing a horrible job, I think it's very easy to learn all of the features and the nuances of the cards if you want to.
But when you're trying to compete with hundreds of cards, the offering can't just be one thing, it's got to be five or six different things. And the more things you add to try to be competitive, the harder it is to stand out.
The Citi Premier card is an interesting card that many people I know haven't really heard of. And it gives consumers 3 points per dollar on, I think it's gas, groceries, air travel, hotels, and dining - which is, like, all the major categories. Yet the value prop, even I, having given that statement multiple times, I always have to question what what are the five things, it's not clear and concise. And so even I, as an expert in the industry keep forgetting. Whereas I think what made Chase so successful with the Chase Reserve card, aside from a few other things, was they came out and they said 3 points on travel and dining.
That that was the pitch.
And when the Chase Sapphire Premier card came out before it was 2x on travel and dining. And they tried to make the pitch so concise, they weren't trying to win you with other things. I think it made it a lot easier. But now even that card, the Reserve is not as popular, they've given some of the perks to other cards. And now to stand out, you have to come up with more and more benefits that make it harder and harder to explain.
Brendan Le Grange 19:12
Let's stay in that space here about the features. Obviously, within credit cards, like air miles are long standing, have been around as a perk from cards, but in terms of the features you're seeing now that are attracting people, or that attracting you - what are the best offers you're seeing out there, or the best features on cards that you see advertised at the moment?
Chris Hutchins 19:32
So, if you talk to a lot of the industry folks, the airline miles cards have gone down in popularity with the people I guess, who spend the most time here. And the best feature, that I think Amex was first then Chase, then either Capital One or Citi, and then the other, was allowing you to take points and transfer them to multiple places. And so I would say that was the biggest feature that's changed a lot.
One of the perspectives in the points industry is, I'm not tied into a thing. It used to be I either want Delta miles or I want cashback or I want Marriott points. Now, you could get a Chase point, which could be cashback, you could use it in the portal, you could go get a gift card, or you could transfer it to Hyatt, or you could transfer it to United. And that flexibility, I think, actually makes those points more valuable.
But that flexibility also leaves many people and myself often included accruing points and then being stressed out about, okay, well, I want to make sure I use them optimally but I don't know how to do that, and so I guess I'm not going to use them. And I think we've gotten this amazing benefit that might have some unintended consequences.
So the transferability of points is a big one.
I think, for the consumer, the incredibly large signup bonuses that banks are willing to offer you, in the United States, at least - and I know also in Australia, and probably a few other countries - are just so wild. You know, if you look at the value of some of these signup bonuses, they could be anywhere from $1,000 to £2,000 or $3,000, to get you to open up a card and spend some money - maybe a few thousand dollars over a few months on the card. And their hope is that you're going to stick around and be a loyal user of this card for, gosh, I have to imagine half a decade or more in order to pay back these huge signup bonuses. But for the consumer, it's a huge win.
So my threshold is like, if they're going to offer you 70,000 points or more, that is a threshold where I'm excited about the bonus. And if it's less, I'm less excited. Unless it's hotel points - generally hotel points are about anywhere from a half to a third as valuable as airline miles, so a hotel would need to be like 150,000 or more to be exciting to me.
Brendan Le Grange 21:52
If you're that first card, the default card on ApplePay, that's probably a really good position because I think I just double click the side of the phone and pay. And unless it says we don't take American Express, you know, and it buzzes and I'll get another card out, but I'm not actually even thinking about it, just the phone paying. So maybe it's even more important today, when that card is virtual and sitting almost invisible.
Chris Hutchins 22:13
There's an app that I use all the time called CardPointers. And the founder of this app, Emmanuel Crouvisier, spent a bunch of time working on iOS 16, before it came out, and was featured as like, you know, top 10 iOS 16 apps. And he's building in these features where there's widgets that will pop up and remind you what you should be using, in what particular place. And we're not at the point yet where it could remind you in real time, oh, you're about to pay at the grocery store, and actually swapped the Apple Pay card - like that would be the magic, would be oh, you know, I'm in the grocery store so when I double tap the button, pull up my my card that's best for groceries. I don't know, I don't know if Apple will ever relinquish control of the selecting or how that would work or, but I think there is at least the possibility of that getting to a point that cards are going to really struggle to compete, because they there's no pole position.
And they're going to have to compete on other things like strange perks.
But these perks that cards offer used to be so cool. I mean, the first card that said, oh, you get a priority pass membership, which lets you go to airline lounges was really cool. Now, I could probably list six or seven different credit cards that all offer Priority Pass memberships. I have three of them, which means I go to the lounge of like which one of my three memberships. So I have no benefit of the other two. And, you know, if you're in the United States, and you pay an annual fee on a card, you probably get free TSA PreCheck or Global Entry reimbursed every five years.
Cards are having to try to get creative, but then it just makes the cards more complicated to use.
Brendan Le Grange 23:50
I think there is also embedded in there an important lesson for credit card issuers. So when I was in Hong Kong, I was working for a credit bureau and one of the nice things with the data at the credit bureau, is that you can see which cards are in the same wallet. So which five credit cards are all linked to one person. Consumers have their favourite card, and if you're that favourite card, there's a massive benefit.
So, here some rough numbers. But if someone's got four cards in their wallet, the first card is getting something like 75% of the spend. So you really want to be there. And you don't get there from a higher credit limit, you get there from a better product fit. And once I started looking at that I could identify these cards in the market - some were big bank brands that had billboards everywhere, celebrity endorsements, they were very popular, but there were also these little cards for a small market share, issued by small players for small niches, but they hit their niche maybe they were linked to a Japanese store and a Japanese airline - and when they were in a wallet, they were really successful. And it made me rethink what success means and pointed me far more to this product aspect.
And then that calls out the complexity you've had with your thinking of your algorithm, in that there's not 'one' person, we can't think about Chase trying to make a card that serves 50 million people. It's how do you hit that niche. And I wonder if you've got any thoughts on what sort of niches exist in the market? What type of customers do you see? And maybe, in which way? Do you think card companies should be looking to get a really successful card product out there in the current environment?
Chris Hutchins 25:23
The average person that I see is using one card for everything. And maybe maybe, maybe they have a second card tied to a retailer. It's surprising how powerful that point of sale 'do you want 20% off this purchase at Nordstrom, or Bloomingdale's or something' gets you to open a card, or at Target.
So when I think about this question about niche cards and broad cards, the card that first came to mind to me was the Chase Freedom Flex, because Chase launches this card that gets you 1% cashback and each quarter, you get 5% cashback on a different set of categories, but you don't know what they are. I think this quarter, this coming Q4, it's like Pay Pal and Walmart or something like that. And I'm like, okay, but like, this can't be a card for me if I don't even know who I'm going to be able to earn outsized rewards from... but it's a great second or third or fourth card on the off chance that 'oh, wow, I think PayPal is Q4, you better believe that in Q4, I'm going to be checking out with PayPal on every retailer on the internet to earn five 5% back' - which it turns out, you can also convert to those transferable points.
But it's a card that I think only appeals to the average consumer, because it's much easier card to get into with a lower credit score. And so I think one big niche area that I don't think, has been experimented that well - and maybe it's because the cost of serving that customer is higher, because lower credit tends to lend to, you know, more default - but the entry cards. There's such a huge gap between what you get from the entry cards, I think, if you're if you're from the United States, and you went to university or even went to university here, there were people that walk around campus trying to get you to sign up for a card to get $20, you know, to sign up for the card. And, and there, you get almost nothing. I don't even know if you get points on these cards that target college students. But the market for I don't have credit yet, is currently served by cards that, I assume, have to be quite profitable for banks, because they're giving up almost nothing, they keep all the interchange, there's no signup bonus, there's no nothing other than maybe $20, $50 or something.
So I think that's an area where we haven't used a lot of data or technology to try and figure out how you could offer a premium experience to someone who doesn't yet have credit. So there's a company that if you haven't talked to you should called Nova Credit, which has tied with international credit bureaus to try to give people who have credit in other countries credit in the United States. But something that could tie to your bank account or tied to the fact that you do have an employment, you do have income coming in. So you could kind of validate someone more than just their credit score and maybe give them an offer or a card that is actually compelling, versus just the only card they can get.
Brendan Le Grange 28:27
Yeah, I have spoken to Misha, and I think he's still one of my top three most downloaded episodes.
Chris Hutchins 28:32
I think this growing wave of consumer loyalty to content over product is becoming really interesting.
You know, let's take Mr. Beast, the YouTube Creator, who has may be one of the largest followings of anyone on the earth has now opened a chocolate brand and a fast food burger brand. Which is somewhat fascinating to think that is there a world where Mr. Beast chocolate or Mr. Beast burger is bigger than Hershey's or McDonald's in five or 10 years, because the consumers just don't care about the legacy loyalty of the brand, as much as they care about the person associated with it. And so I think a card issuer who is willing to take bets outside of traditional corporate partners, so not just airlines and hotel groups, and the new ones that pop up, and the large transportation companies that are already big public companies. But what about some of these kind of influencers are creators or people that have transcended just like a Tiktok channel, but really become like global brands as people or as content brands? I don't know what becomes of that, but it would surprise me if there is not, you know, a Mr. Beast card sometime in the next few years.
And, you know, the loyalty that he has with his audience, I think it's something that's not to be overlooked.
And historically, the way it's worked is you've had companies like I think acorns has a card that's really more of a debit card tied to their product. But then they worked with celebrities to kind of endorse it. But why aren't those celebrities, you know, issuing their own cards, and many of them have a household name, but not a household engagement strategy other than be in the movies every few years. But I think with content online, we now have at least a dozen or so people with massive like bigger than, you know, most consumer brand engagement with an audience that could be ripe for partnership for card issuers to do something with.
Brendan Le Grange 30:37
What we want to do is, we want to get people really engaged, and it's hard to do that as a bank, it's hard to get people excited about you if you're a 400 year old bank with marble pillars outside the front door.
Chris Hutchins 30:49
But imagine how cool it would be if a bank said 'okay, well, here are all the kinds of things a card could offer, it could offer lounge access, it can offer points, multiples on certain categories, it could offer a 0% APR for a certain number of months, it could have a variable annual fee'. And you could essentially give people the ability to create their own thing. So you could say I want a bonus on this category. And I want this perk, and I want this fee, and maybe the other things fall in line, and you could custom generate a card.
Historically, it was like, if you have an association or a sports team, you can create an easy co-brand, you put the logo on and 1% goes to you. But that was the extent of customising. And I've looked at this, I was like, 'oh, what if I wanted an All The Hacks credit card? Chase would never want to talk to me, right? Like it just it would not in their interest right now because they can't scalability support it. But there's no reason they couldn't build a better version of these affinity cards, where there's a bit of a menu of services and features and offerings. I don't know it just seems interesting. And I haven't seen anyone try to do it.
Brendan Le Grange 31:52
Yeah, it is, and I don't want to make anybody else their fortune, but yeah, it sounds like a great idea.
If people are interested in upgrading their lives and interested in learning from you about these various hacks that you've discovered yourself - where should people go to find out more about All The Hacks?
Chris Hutchins 32:08
If you're listening to this, you're listening to podcasts, so you can search for All The Hacks right here, where all the podcasts are?.
You got www.allthehacks.com, we have a newsletter. I would say, normally, if you're not a podcast person then we try to get a lot of the same content in the newsletter, but if you're not a podcast person, you're probably not here right now! But the website has all the old episodes, all the newsletter back issues I've written, you know, you can email me I share my email in every episode. So you just have to listen to one episode and you can get my email and I try to answer all the questions for people about anything.
You can find me on social media, I'm @Hutchins on Twitter.
Brendan Le Grange 32:40
Perfect. I'll put all those in the show notes as well. But yeah, I'd say the episodes I listened to were just so dense with information, it's not just 'buy this card', you really described very well the sort of person that it's working for and why you're making your recommendations. So everyone tune in.
Chris, thank you so much for making the time to join my show. It's been a pleasure chatting to you.
Chris Hutchins 32:59
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
Brendan Le Grange 33:01
And thank you all for listening. Please do look for and follow the show on your favourite podcast platform, and share the updates widely on LinkedIn where lending nerds are found in our largest concentration. Plus, send me a connection request while you're there. This show is written and recorded by myself Brendan Le Grange in Brighton, England and edited by Fina Charleson of FC productions. Show Music is by Iam_Wake and you can find show notes and written transcripts at www.HowtoLendMoneytoStrangers.show
And I'll see you again next Thursday.