BILT tried to do a consumer friendly thing in keeping card numbers the same as from WF and it seemingly backfired in a variety of really annoying ways. In theory, this was supposed to be consumer friendly, as places where your card was already saved would not need updating.

In reality:

• Since the expiration date changed, many places that previously had the card saved required it to be deleted/readded anyways (no option to update expiration as the BILT 1.0 MC expiration dates hadn't occurred yet)
• Validation portals like the Mastercard World Legend concierge don't recognize the card numbers as valid (checks first six digit as the BIN [Bank Identification Number], BILT reused the range of a standard MC World/MC World Elite, so it doesn't recognize Palladium card numbers as eligible)
• Money aggregators like Monarch and others are apparently experiencing issues linking to BILT and staying connected...

In terms of direct Cardless access, my suspicion is that BILT's deal with Cardless required BILT to be the app and provide the frontend, and Cardless merely to provide servicing like phone calls about card management related questions. This is probably for several reasons:

• Primarily, BILT wants to be your rewards ecosystem - for housing, for neighborhood spend, for travel, for your credit card spend. If you're trying to do that, you want everyone to stay in your app as much as possible. The way that BILT 2.0 tries to heavily get people to "push" their rent (initiate the housing payment from BILT, rather than your landlord or mortgage servicer) is a huge sign of that. If you move to a different property with a different landlord and property portal, or you go from renting to having a mortgage, you edit who you're paying in the BILT app, but you're still paying rent in the BILT app using the same steps.
• Secondarily, BILT may have had some amount of leverage to reduce the servicing costs of Cardless by saying they don't need the platform.

Of course this has led BILT 2.0 cards to lack basic features on the BILT app, such as card alerts (purchase over X amount, international purchase, card declined, etc.) and detailed merchant information per transaction (merchant phone # & address, detailed MCC code) from what BILT 2.0 Cardholders have told me.

In terms of customer service: I figure BILT has about another 7-10 days to get customer service working or people with the Palladium are going to start dropping off while they can still get the annual fee refunded within the first 30 days. The BILT 1.0 $0 AF card has a decent enough SUB to churn and sock drawer if you already got it transitioned (I wouldn't have taken the 5/24 hit, but we're talking people who already have it). The $95 AF card, they may still find the multipliers worth it. But at $495 AF for the Palladium, the complete lack of CS is not commensurate. Some may sockdrawer instead because BILT's SUB terms with cardless mention a clawback possibility, but having the AF and then no ongoing spend to fuel cardless buying more points from BILT on the swipe fees isn't good for BILT either.