Sounds like their marketing/product team have basically decided to copy Santander minus the monthly fee and cashback on direct debits in favour of an account getting £1,500 in deposits/month
Not just Citibank. There is a long history of overseas firms coming to the UK thinking they can do better than the incumbents before pulling out after a few years.
Citibank
ING
Kaupthing
Landsbanki
National Australia Bank
etc..
I’d be pretty surprised if that’s the case. They needed to grow a sizeable customer base, of people who regularly engaged with the account and have now done that. They have invested heavy in cashback at fairly sizeable loss, I expect there is a long term plan to recoup some of that. Could of course be totally wrong and they have sold off / exited the market by the end of 2025!
Most people only “regularly engaged with the account” for the cashback. Now that’s been cutback, there will be far fewer people regularly engaging with their accounts, so the customer base will shrink fast.
It will be interesting to see. I know at one point, possibly still, the board at JP were at loggerheads over the viability of it all with the current CEO.
He’ll be retiring soon I think so anything could happen in the next few years. I suspect they were too late to market for new products and have missed the boat now.
The ad that Chase has been running for the last 6 months (the mum in the kitchen one) has already been focusing on everything else apart from Cashback.
Those ads have all been about how you can use the account to save for different things - ‘budgeting tools’ for a coffee machine, a regular saving account for a holiday to Costa Rico and Nutmeg for saving to send her son to Uni. I suspect someone in Chase has been looking at if that campaign has worked and if they’re still seeing new customers join have decided that they’ve got enough of a package to offer without having to flog the cash back option.
‘Groceries’ is a very broad catergory though - personally, looking at my previous months spend and what qualified for cash back, I don’t think I’ll be massively loosing out on this (or in fact, loosing out at all - in Jan everything would probably have counted as ‘Groceries’).
How ‘specific’ are they when they work out if it’s money spent on groceries, or transport. Is it broadly by merchant, or does the merchant specifically tell Chase what it was you bought as well? Would buying fancy bin liners (got a very fussy kitchen bin) on Amazon count? Would a replacement power cable for my PC count? If it’s by merchant only, would getting a Morrisons delivery through Amazon Prime also count?
They use Merchant Category Code (MCC) which I think may be allocated to a retailer by a higher authority than Chase (perhaps Mastercard?).
Use the “Spotlight” tool in the Chase app to analyse spending by category to see which spending has (and hence which retailers have) been categorised as ‘Groceries’ etc.
I don’t disagree with that - I actually quite like Chase as-is now, and in honestly if they’d started to let people back I would’ve probably gone there not Lloyds.
Not overly convinced on this one. What makes what they have better then Monzling? I haven’t seen the app in a good while so it’s possible it’s significantly better. Also, what about non Fintech rivals, nearly none of what Monzo offers now is significantly ‘Fintech’ over say HSBC, Natwest et al. Trends, and slightly better credit card installment plans for two.
I agree but I’d imagine that’ll get 
from some here.
To be honest, I’ve never really been all that bothered about the cashback, especially with it being capped. The real killer for me now is the very sub par savings rate in the pots, and nil rate on the current account.
The latter is just another thing that has been removed or reduced, as it did offer 1% previously. I’m also not a big fan of preferential rates for new customers. I guess at the end of the day, I just don’t like being taken for a mug, sorry, taken for granted, or being a victim of an obvious business model.
Nothing on Amazon will count as their MCC isn’t groceries. Buying the same stuff in Tesco would count as Chase would see it all as groceries.
Just seen on the other forum that Monzo appears to be offering at least some people 1% Cashback on all purchases (subject to exclusions) worldwide up to £100 for new Flex applicants.
What about if I bought a big ticket item, such as a washing machine, from a supermarket group like Tesco/Asda/Sainsbury/Lidl. Would that be treated as groceries? Or would that be amount flagged?
Should be fine I suspect as I don’t think it changes the mcc. You could always buy a packet of crisps with the washing machine 
I think gift cards bought there would too. I know lottery tickets (sole item in the transaction) got cashback even though gambling doesn’t.
Interesting about the lottery. I cannot remember which bank it was, but in the past one of my cards was initially preset to not allow gambling transactions, and would not allow me to purchase a lottery ticket with it.
I was buying a scratcher in December so that might be different tbf. I buy the odd lotto ticket online so I wouldn’t know.
I think they will lose some people, but others will stay as they like it app etc. So I assume they have worked out they are comfortable with the customer numbers they have, including losing ‘x’% who will chase they next offer.
The main reason some might stay is there is also no direct competitor to jump to, who else is offering a free current account with 1% cashback.
Probably only on iOS.
On Android (flagship S24 Ultra), it’s still slow to update. You open the app (takes a while because of stupid animated logo every single time), and what you see first is your out-of-date balance, which takes several seconds to update. Swiping navigation is also slow compared to e.g. Monzo and Starling.
Overall a bad app experience, I don’t understand what Android users see in it.
Chase is still ultimately a decent bank, a decent app and has a decent offering. Nothing has changed for me there.
I was unfortunately only just trying it out as a main account, as I was earning a few quid more a month with it than I was with Santander and with this change I am better off just returning my spending to Santander (my DD were never moved across).
Another thing is that, unless it has changed, with the Chase app you can only load it on one device at once. For example, you could not run iOS/android on a tablet AND a phone. My phone goes out with me, but my tablet doesn’t, so that can be a bit of a nuisance.