Earning a Cruise for Writing More Checks; Banks Target Existing Clients With Expanded Rewards; Watch the Expiration Date
BANKS USED TO give you a free toaster when you opened a savings account. Now they want to give you Royal Caribbean cruises and Tumi luggage for taking out a loan, paying your bills online and writing checks.</br></br>Building on programs that reward customers for using debit and credit cards, banks are rolling out deals that allow customers to accumulate points for just about every transaction they complete and for every account they open. The goal: getting customers to use more of their everyday bank's services, instead of spreading their business around to rivals.</br></br>Three of the biggest U.S. banks -- Citigroup Inc.'s Citibank unit, National City Corp. and Banco Popular, a unit of Popular Inc. -- have recently launched or sweetened customer-loyalty programs in which freebies, varying from Starbucks gift cards to airline tickets, can be earned more quickly than through rewards tied to credit and debit cards alone. Nearly 10 million people have enrolled in these programs so far, and the growing interest is spurring credit-card company MasterCard Inc. to introduce technology and consulting services in the next several months that will keep track of accumulated points for banks.</br></br>This isn't the first time banks have dangled high-end freebies to their customers, but in the past, such gifts were usually reserved for new depositors.</br></br>At National City, which has 1,200 bank branches from Missouri to Pennsylvania, customers who enroll in the "Points from National City" program have 22 different ways to rack up points. Taking out a mortgage generates 50,000 points, and the reward for adding direct deposit to an existing checking account or using a debit card for the first time is 5,000 points. Customers accumulate 25 points every time they write a check, plus additional points for using their credit or debit cards, just as they would in a traditional rewards program.