On a recent phone call with my relationship manager at Capital One, I was offered the chance to apply for the company’s Venture X Business Card. The card is unremarkable except in one respect: it comes with a $500,000 minimum spend. By a very large margin, that’s the highest minimum spend requirement I’ve ever seen. What’s Capital One doing here?
Background
The Capital One Venture X Business Card is a rebranding of Capital One’s erstwhile Spark Travel Elite. Like that card, this new card is a premium travel card with an annual fee of $395 that’s geared toward small businesses. It’s not available to apply for online (or to Spark Cash Plus cardholders) and is only available to clients of Capital One relationship managers.
- 2X miles on every purchase
- 10X miles on hotels and rental cars booked through Capital One’s travel portal
- 5X miles on flights when booked through Capital One’s travel portal
- $300 in statement credits annually for travel booked through Capital One’s travel portal
- 10,000 bonus miles annually after your first card anniversary
- Access to the Premier Collection, Capital One’s selection of premium hotels which give cardholders benefits like room upgrades and free breakfasts
- Complimentary access to Capital One Lounges and Priority Pass membership
- TSA PreCheck or Global Entry application fee credit every four years
$500,000 minimum spend?!
Over the past few weeks, I’d heard rumblings about the huge minimum spend requirement on the Capital One Venture X Business Card and inquired recently to get the details firsthand from my relationship manager.
According to him, the welcome bonus for this card is 300,000 Capital One miles and cardholders must spend half a million dollars (!) in the 12 months after approval to get it. Specifically, you’ll get 150,000 miles after spending $30,000 in the first 3 months and another 150,000 miles after spending a total of $500,000 within the first year.
My thoughts
Who is Capital One hoping to woo with this welcome bonus? It seems like nearly the only people they have any hope of attracting are those who don’t know what else is out there.
American Express, by comparison, is currently offering a welcome bonus of 200,000 Membership Rewards points after spending $15,000 in the first three months of opening their Business Platinum Card. Given that Membership Rewards points are roughly as valuable as Capital One miles, American Express’s welcome bonus is literally twice as good as Capital One’s offer for 150,000 miles after $30,000 of spend.
The Venture X Business Card itself isn’t half bad–unlimited 2X on all spend makes it one of the best options out there for everyday spend–but I just don’t get why the welcome bonus is so outlandish. Is this a misstep? Capital One is relatively new to the world of business credit cards, a fairly different space to the subprime market where the company still makes most of its money. Am I missing something?
8 comments
$500k isn’t a hard spend but the miles they give isn’t worth it.
150/500 = less than .33 miles per dollar. Pass
1) The “minimum spend” is $30,000, not $500,000. And “minimum spend” is a misnomer – it is the spend required to get the sign up bonus. From your post title I assumed the minimum spend was $500,000 a year to simply have an account open, which isn’t outlandish for a card that is intended to be for business customers.
2) Maybe Capital One wants to avoid random individuals with businesses and LLCs applying for the Venture Business cards and earning the sign up bonus without intending to put a lot of spend on the card
I was using minimum spend in the colloquial sense. When most folks talk about minimum spend requirements (MSRs) in the context of a credit card, they’re talking about the minimum dollar amount that a new cardholder is required to spend in order to attain a sign-up bonus, and virtually never about the amount of money required to keep an account open. Here’s an Investopedia article that talks more about MSRs.
Without venturing too far into semantics, I consider the MSR on this card to be $500,000 and not $30,000 because $500,000 is the minimum spend required to attain the entire sign-up bonus, not just a portion of it. But even if you were to consider $30,000 the MSR for this card, it would still be weirdly high considering competitor cards offer bigger sign-up bonuses for lower MSRs.
Whats in your wallet? My Capital one expericne was hell..worst company ever,
I was thinking about that card until I saw the spend requirement. Nope. Way too high for what it offers (and I don’t have plans to spend $500K any time soon on biz expenses).
I’m right there with you–hard to imagine who this bonus is actually going to attract
How do you get a relationship manager? I had one several years ago when I was spending 1mm or more a month doing ms but now I’m only spending about 100k a month and I see to have lost mine.
It’s generally just a function of spend, but you can also be connected to one by friends/colleagues/family with an RM who are willing to make an intro.