Standard Chartered Cash Back Credit Card

With so many credit card options nowadays, I've been trying to find the one offering the best deal. For some time, I've settled with the Citibank Cash Back Visa. The mechanics is very simple. They rebate you 0.5% of all your purchases every month. There are no points to be earned, that requires converting to some gift items. I swear some banks (Metrobank, in particular) are not really earnest in handing out those rewards. Despite my numerous requests to cash out my points into GC's, I still have yet to receive them after several months.

Recently, I got the Shell Visa cash back credit card. It has all the benefits of their old cash back visa plus you get 5% rebate when filling up gas at Shell. The only catch as I found out later is that its not available at all Shell gas stations. I guess some of the franchise stations did not agree to give up their margins.

Standard Chartered recently entered the cash back fray with their Platinum card. I cancelled my regluar Standard Chartered Mastercard in favor of this cash back platinum. While they only rebate back 0.3% of purchases, they give a special 3% for purchases from department stores and restaurants. So I have to pick and choose which card to use where.

The Standard Chartered cash back cards have the following additional drawbacks:

1. Cash back earned has to be redeemed manually. Their system does not automatically credit it to your payables. You have to call their call center and request for it. Undoubtedly, a lot of people will not bother, thus saving the bank some money.
2. You must accumulate at least P500 before you can redeem your cash back credit. Very deceptive.
3. The cash back credits have an expiration! So for those cardholders who do not reach the P500 minimum redeemable credits, they risk foregoing the entire amount! Sneaky!