Update 7/28/23: Thiseye has pointed out in the comments that Raise has released more details about a forthcoming debit card, so it looks like my prediction in the original post might’ve been correct.
The Raise debit card will earn 2% cashback on Raise purchases and 1% cashback everywhere else. For a debit card that’s not terrible seeing as most people’s debit cards don’t reward them for spend at all, but it’s still underwhelming seeing as there are plentiful credit cards that offer 2%/2x on spend everywhere rather than only in the Raise app. Not to mention the fact that the cashback isn’t true cashback as it’s payable as Raise Cash and so can only be redeemed towards other gift cards on Raise.
One potentially interesting use case could be if it can be used to buy gift cards in the Ibotta app. Ibotta only lets you pay with a debit card, so this could be a way to earn a little extra cashback if you don’t have the PayPal Business Debit Mastercard.
On that landing page Raise is also advertising a new feature called ‘myRaise Rewards’. Its description is:
We all have to shop. Why not get rewarded for it? Get exclusive offers and special promotions you‚ll (sic) actually want to use.
That’s all that they’ve disclosed for now. That sounds like it’ll be something like a shopping portal or a place that’ll list a bunch of coupon codes. If so, that’s not at all exciting given the plethora of other sites and apps offering those kinds of services, so hopefully Raise has something a little more unique planned that’ll help differentiate it.
They have a new version of the app coming, plus they’ve shared that Raise Cash you earn can be used to buy crypto. I imagine there’ll be fees and/or poor buy rates for that, so I doubt that’ll be a good redemption option. Again though, we only have limited details about all these features right now, so we’ll see how it pans out.
Slide sent out an email out to users today asking them to complete a survey. It had 27 questions, but was super-quick to complete.
About a quarter of the questions were demographic-related at the end, along with several asking about when and how you’ll be doing your holiday shopping. The potentially interesting parts of the survey though were that there were a number of questions relating to debit card usage, a few about loyalty programs and a couple about cryptocurrency.
A couple of months ago Raise paused its affiliate program which means they no longer offer cashback via shopping portals. A week later, Slide also paused its affiliate program (Slide is owned by Raise) which meant you couldn’t earn additional cashback via shopping portals when buying gift cards from Slide either.
The reason given by Raise in the email they sent to affiliates was:
We are pausing our program because we are reserving our marketing spend to invest in a new venture that will launch in 2023
Slide recently revamped how it operated by going from offering 4% cashback on all gift card purchases to giving varying cashback rates, along with adding the ability to buy gift cards from the GetSlide.com website rather than only via the Slide app. None of those were “new ventures” though, more a case of amending their existing offering, so it certainly seemed like something else was on the horizon.
Will There Be A Slide/Raise Debit Card?
Based on this survey that’s being sent out, it seems like that new venture will be a Raise and/or Slide debit card. If that is indeed the case, it remains to be seen as to what form that debit card will take.
My initial thought was that it might be some kind of cashback debit card. Unless it offers more than 2% cashback though, there’d be no reason to use a Slide debit card over any number of credit cards offering 2% cashback or more. Having said that, if the debit card offered 0.5%-1% on all spending but 5% on Slide purchases, I can imagine getting one solely for buying gift cards from Slide.
That’s no doubt wishful thinking though for a couple of reasons. The first is that there were some questions about loyalty programs for retailers like Starbucks, Nordstrom, etc. That might mean that rather than earning straight cashback, you earn some kind of proprietary points that can be redeemed for something – probably gift cards from Slide.
The inclusion of questions about cryptocurrency suggest that you might earn rewards in the form of crypto to some extent when using the debit card. If that’s the case, it feels like Raise/Slide saw the crypto bandwagon pass them by a few years ago and now they’re desperately running after it despite seeing it disappear over the edge of a ravine.
Your Thoughts?
That’s all speculation though based on this one quick survey they’ve just sent out. It remains to be seen if any of this will come to pass and if so, what kind of rewards will be offered.
Still, it’s always fun to speculate, so what do you think the Raise/Slide debit card will be like? And what would they need to offer in order to entice you into applying for one? Let us know in the comments below.
Sounds like you were right about their new product they eliminated all marketing (portal, coupons, etc) money for last year:
https://www.raise.com/earn
Now that link is gone from the main page. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be shown there yet
It goes to a 404 error page now. Seems it never got off the ground.