sdsearch

It depends on your risk tolerance. The online evidence of conversion may precede the physical by only a couple weeks, and in that case it seems safe to apply after you see the online evidence of conversion. But in some cases, it takes over a month between the online evidence of intended conversion until you actually receive the card, and there are occasional cases where the card doesn't even get made or mailed until weeks later. Since no one who has been in the latter situation has tried "jumping the gun", we don't yet have evidence of whether "jumping the gun" in those cases would be safe or not.

(And there's no way to tell, until you get the card, how long it's going to take to get the card from when you frist see the online evidence of intended conversion. So you can't know when you see the online evidence whether you're on the "fast track" to getting the card like most often happens or on the "very slow track" to getting the card as sometimes happens.)

And that's why it's definitely safe to wait for the card to arrive, but we cannot yet declare that it's definitely safe for everyone to "jump the gun" as soon as they see the online evidence of intended conversion.

(I'm using "intended" before "conversion" because we don't know for sure whether the conversion process is considered complete by Citi the moment they change the online wording, or just if they've started a process at the point. If the process goes smoothly and quickly, there's not much time lag between the online evidence and the card being made and sent, so there's not much distinction necessary. But in those cases where the process takes a long time, we don't understand what the nature of the delay is, and thus we don't understand how and if that might affect the ability of you to get a bonus if you "jump the gun" in what turns out to be one of the slow conversion cases.)

And many people don't want to apply for the next card that quickly simply because they're still have a lot of the minimum spend on the previous card to do. It's only that fraction of people who are doing the physical spend much faster than necessary who are likely to even be in the position of wanting to apply again before they get the physical card.