$658,361 of spend → $78,983 of value, in 5 months.

Matteo already had the US LLC and ran all his spend through it. He banked with Mercury, and the card they gave him paid 1.5% cashback.

The business was getting bigger and Matteo wanted something more robust underneath it. Mercury was fine at a smaller size, less so once the volume grew. He also did not want the hassle of it. Getting to the States was never the issue, he flies constantly. He just did not want to spend a trip sitting in a branch doing paperwork, so it needed to be handled remotely.

On the cards side he was stuck. Matteo had built up a credit line with Mercury and did not want to give that up by moving, so switching only made sense if what replaced it was clearly better than the 1.5% he already had.

That mattered more for him than it would for most people. He and his wife fly constantly, to business events and to resorts, and all of it was being paid in cash. At 1.5% back that spend was never going to turn into a business class seat, so he was leaving tens of thousands a year behind.

He signed in February. Here is what we did.

In the five months since February, Matteo has put $658,361 through the cards. On his old Mercury card at 1.5%, that spend pays back $9,875.

What he got instead:

That is $45,403 of travel already taken. On top of it he still has 1.24M points sitting in his account. Valued at the 2.71¢ he has actually been getting, not at some best case, that is another $33,580.

$78,983 in total. Eight times what the old card would have paid him, and 12% back on every dollar he spent. His best single booking, Newark to Barcelona in business, went out at 200,000 points against a $13,453 cash fare. That is 6.73¢ a point.