A lot of wealth management companies offer exclusive credit cards to their high end customers, Merrill Lynch is no different. In addition to offering the Bank of America Preferred Rewards program they also offer the Merrill Lynch Octave credit card.
There isn’t a lot known about this card because it looks like it was only released sometime in November of 2014. Below is what we do know about this card.
Like most high end cards, the Octave is black and made of metal. User ccorso from creditcardforum.com shared these pictures:
Octave Card Side View
To be eligible for this card you need to have at minimum a Merrill Lynch account balance of $10,000,000 (ten million) dollars. You also need to be a Merrill Lynch Private Wealth Management or US Trust client.
According to trickless from Flyertalk this card earns 2.5x Merrill Points per $1 in spend. There are no category bonuses on this card or relationship bonuses. There is no limit to the amount of points you can earn.
Points never expire and you can redeem your points for gift cards, cash back, statement credit, to offset any purchase or for flight bookings. When redeeming for gift cards it looks like the points are worth 1¢, assuming that you can resell the gift cards for 90% of face value this would mean that the card earns 2.25% cash back or 2.5% if you can get the full value out of the gift cards.
When redeeming for cash back or statement credit points are worth 1¢ a piece as well, meaning that it’s not really worth it to redeem for gift cards (as it’s always possible to purchase these at some sort of discount. Even if you just use the Octave card you’d effectively be getting a 2.5% discount).
Your other option is to redeem your points for flights, when you do this points are worth up 2¢ a piece but you have to redeem a minimum of 25,000 points ($500 in flights) at a time. The value you get out of this option will depend on what airlines you redeem for:
You’ll also earn frequent flyer miles and elite qualifying miles on these flights as well. If flights are under $500, you’ll still need to pay the minimum of 25,000 points. For flights over $500, you’ll only get a value of 1¢ a point (and this is done in increments of 2,500 points).
This card has an annual fee of $950 and for that price tag you’d expect a lot of benefits to make it worthwhile. Here is what the card offers:
People that have this card have reported that the 20% off discount is actually quite useful. You have to use their booking engine but it takes 20% off the lowest published fare.
At best this card would earn 5% everywhere, which is pretty impressive but chances are you wouldn’t have enough flights to get this value all of the time. Let’s try to be conservative and say points are worth 1¢ a piece and then let’s be generous and say you get $450 of value out of the card benefits. That leaves you with an annual fee of $500, if you compared this card to a 2% cash back card with no annual fee you’d need to spend $10,000 to recoup the annual fee costs.
I think it’s pretty reasonable to expect that somebody with $10,000,000 in assets would spend $10,000+ a year on their credit card. If you have the assets already invested with ML, I’d recommend this card. I certainly don’t think it’s worth moving that amount of money just for this card.
Do you have any experience with this card? If so, let me know in the comments.
Thanks to these posts/forum threads:
