I wonder how affordable this would be for a free current account. Credit card companies make more money from fees on merchants, annual fees in some cases, and interest.
Do any free current accounts offer anything like this (apart from cashback for direct debits like Natwest and TSB)?
The only I can find is Tesco. Tesco’s current account gives you 1 Clubcard point for every £8 you spend outside Tesco in one transaction (so a spend of £7.99 gets 0 points and £15.99 gets you 1 point). And then Clubcard points convert to other things, including airmiles at a rate of 250 points = 600 airmiles. You get 2 points per £1 spend in Tesco currently.
With Amex £600 spend would make you 600 airmiles.
With Tesco to get that, if every transaction you made was £8 and in a shop other than Tesco, you’d need to spend £2000 to get the same amount of airmiles. In reality though this is going to be higher because they round down your spend. So it’s not very lucrative, but better than nothing I suppose.
Inside Tesco however, you’d only need to spend £125 to get 600 miles.