Rove Card’s 4x Points & AI-Driven Award Redemptions: The Next Big Thing In Travel Rewards? – View from the Wing

Rove plans to be both a new credit card with transferable points, and a transfer currency itself that partners with several banks. The Y Combinator company outlines their card’s value proposition:

No annual fee2x on everything3x on travel4x for 30 days for referrals. Referral bonus spend is capped @ $2,500 per month per referral (each additional referral adds an additional month of 4x capped at $2,500 spend)extended warranty, trip cancellation and delay coverage

If you join the waitlist you can begin referring customers now, and the first approved customers are reported to get some additional benefits once the card application and product go live.

They tell me they have 13 transfer partners so far including a hotel chain. They mention Air France KLM, Aeromexico, and Accor but the rest remain under wraps until each one has signed off on use of their name.

Rewards value proposition aside, they’re attacking two basic problems:

getting younger people without significant credit history into rewards credit cardsmaking travel rewards accessible to mass consumers, given how complex using miles can be

How well they do this remains to be seen! And whether they can make money with a Capital One-style 2x value proposition plus enhanced earning beyond it, without Capital One’s scale, and skewed heavily towards travel redemptions without a preponderance of lower-cost redemption options remains so be seen!

Aim To Approve More Young Customers

They do the first using cashflow underwriting (connect your bank account, see actual spend pattern) in addition to FICO scores with the goal of reaching more young people with thin credit files. The most robust your credit history, the more they say they’ll rely on FICO. (For many fintechs, relying on underwriting without reference to credit score hasn’t been proven out yet in a downturn.)

Goal Of Seamless Redemption Of Points For Award Flights

While Rove says they have points transfers they see their killer app as the ability to search and book awards with their partners seamlessly.

search for award spaceone click sign up for the transfer partner’s program within the appredeem your Rove miles instantly for travel (with instantaneous points transfer on the back end)

This apparently rolls out in stages with various partners. It’s not clear how much AI is involved in the process, but their investor pitch emphasizes that aspect of booking travel.

Pool Points From Cards Across Multiple Banks

They say they have a card issuer, and that they are going to be a transfer partner of several banks – their currency as a transfer partner is expected to come out before year-end, while their card they say should come out in winter 2025.

As a card this is interesting, especially the referral earn as well as 2x on unbonused spend transferable to at least 13 currencies. $2,500 per month for twelve months at 4x means 120,000 points.

As a rewards currency this is interesting. Depending on transfer ratios from different banks, it becomes possible not just to optimize the high-earning cards across categories from a single bank (think Sapphire Reserve plus Freedom Unlimited, or Strata Premier plus Double Cash) but across different banks that may not today have points that transfer to miles.

Could They Finally Solve Making Award Redemption Easy And Accessible?

The real potential as a business is that Rove has visions of cracking the complexity challenge in booking award travel. Point.me does a great job with tutorials walking members visually through the steps of signing up for a program, transferring points, and booking an award through an airline website. They claim to be able to automate all of that so it’s accessible to anyone without having to pay attention.

The snag, though, seems like the underlying airline technology. This relies on airline APIs for account signups, and instant points transfer (even transfers between Chase and United sometimes hit snags!) plus airline systems for showing availability can be unreliable. How will they handle false positives in availability where awards show up as available but ticket issuance fails?

That’s why I can’t wait to actually see and test this – since the concept sounds great but execution is really, really hard.