UOB has made a small change to their terms and conditions for the UOB Preferred Platinum Visa card.

From 2 May, only mobile contactless payments and selected online transactions will earn 10x UNI$ (or 4 mpd).

Mobile payment includes Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Google Pay and UOB Mighty. The cap of S$1,000 per calendar month remains to earn the elevated number of UNI$, after which the earn rate reverts to the usual 0.4 mpd.

What this means is that using the physical credit card on the PayWave terminals will only earn you a measly 0.4 mpd, so you are better off loading that card on your mobile phone and leaving the card at home.

Note that this does not include transactions made by Samsung’s Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) technology. NFC payments using Samsung Pay are somewhat in the grey zone, so your mileage may vary.

Also, public transport payments via SimplyGo are excluded, so you will earn 0.4 mpd for those.

Current practice

Currently, cardholders will earn 10 UNI$ (or 4 mpd) for all contactless payments, as well as selected online transactions, up to a cap of S$1,000 per calendar month.

The ‘selected online transactions’ include online shopping, online food and grocery delivery, as well as entertainment purchases under the following MCCs:

Final thoughts

This is a truly hard push towards digital credit cards, challenging old habits of carrying physical cards around. Alas, while mobile payments are practically everywhere, there are still some merchants who insist on sighting or waving the physical card (e.g. petrol kiosks).

For those of you who still have this habit of bringing your card around, perhaps this is a good chance to migrate to mobile pay and just lock that card up for good.