The OCBC Titanium Rewards card has been very impressive, and a valuable asset to those who are in the business of earning miles. The card allows you to earn 4 mpd for shopping online and offline, both locally and overseas. In addition, there is an ongoing time limited promotion where you’ll also earn 4 mpd for mobile payments and personal care stores.
For the latter two categories, it should be noted that the promotion was originally intended to end in Sep last year, but was extended to Dec 2018. Some people, myself included had gone to the extent to apply for both Blue and Pink versions of the card, raising the miles earning cap to 96000 miles per card anniversary. In addition, it is widely known that the usual limit of S$100 per transaction for NFC payments can be overcome if you use Samsung Pay (MST) via selected Samsung devices. This, coupled with the ongoing 4 mpd mobile payments promotion, meant that one could possibly earn 4 mpd from all payments at merchants with a credit card swipe function, subject to your credit limit.
However, its seems that OCBC has decided to terminate the 4 mpd promotion for mobile payments and purchases at personal care stores prematurely. The promotion was supposed to end on 31 Dec 2018, but it has been brought forward to 4 Aug 2018.
What does this mean for all of us, at least when it comes to mobile or contactless payments? As of now, there is a far superior promotion where you can earn up to 8 mpd on all purchases made via Apple Pay using your Citi cards. This is scheduled to end on 31 Jul 2018. Only 4 days later, the 4 mpd mobile payments promotion with OCBC Titanium Rewards will also be terminated. This means that we will have to fall back on the handy UOB Preferred Platinum Visa (PPV) to earn 4 mpd for all Visa PayWave transactions from then on.
While it was only a matter of time for OCBC to pull the plug on this promotion, all we can do now is to hope for other promotions where you can time your purchases or transactions strategically to make the most miles out of them. Of late, we have seen the IKEA 12 mpd promotion and the Mileslife 6 mpd promotion with the OCBC Titanium Rewards card, so it is not entirely impossible for such promotions to surface in the future.