Originally Posted by
smashingly
IMHO the best commercial strategy for ANZ would be to wait until October or the New Year when they’ve won ex KB customers seeking a decent airpoints card, then ramp up their annual fees to mitigate the interchange fee changes. They will have a more monopolistic position once KB exits, and they don’t have the same “people’s bank” mission statement as KB. Which doesn’t bode well for us, but I don’t see how else ANZ’s card can be commercially sustainable with interchange fees being further reduced in future.
I used to do that! I was self-employed, so I had to make provisional tax payments and GST payments several times per year. The APD earned, almost cancelled out IRD’s (Westpac’s really) CC fee of 1.2%. if you also factored in the SP earn it was definitely worth it: IIRC it worked out at about $5/SP, way cheaper than flying ($12.5 to $25+ per SP).
And I used to use my card to load money into a Goldmoney account (gold backed / gold based account with a debit card that you can use just like normal), then 4-5 weeks later I would refund it all back into my bank account or the KB card itself. It counted as a purchase NOT a cash withdrawal so I earned APD and SP off that (I even asked Kiwibank support before I tried this idea out, and they confirmed that it would work).
EDIT: and at the time Goldmoney didn’t charge any CC fees