123 Credit Card (Fuel)

Jacka87

Ok I have just got a 123 current account and a 123 credit card with santander. I reckon that with all my bills coming out of the current account (including mortgage) and putting teh right spending on my credit card then I can pocket around £20 per month (after the £2 fee).

That said its clearly critical I get teh spending in the right place on the credit card and I have discovere a little issue and hope somebody has resolved this one.

Basically if you send on fuel you get 3% cash back and 1% on supermarket purchases, unfortunatly they have decided that a spend on fuel can sometimes count as a supermarket purchase instead of a fuel purchase if for example its from a tesco garage. The santander website allows you to search for places where cash back is received and it either labels it as Asda Petrol or Asda (PS Asda is my most convinient filling point), but at my local asda it only has an ASDA not an ASDA Petrol, so does this mean I will only get 1% cash back? Does anybody know of a way of checking?

PS for anybody else considering this card, they have decided that M&S is a supermarket not a department store so 1% not 2%.

Im still happy I have the card but just want to make sure I am maximising the benefit!

Thanks in advance.

Gurranes

From your description they must be generating the cash back based upon the merchant category code (MCC or sometimes known as SIC Code). This is a 4 digit code used globally to identify the type of trade a merchant typically carries out.

It is unfortunately down to the merchant to decide how they want to be categorised when they set up their card servicing. M&S used to be down as a department store, but for some reason they switched to being a supermarket a few years back. Probably a better interchange rate for them.

There are 2 seperate codes for supermarkets/grocery stores (5411 & 9751) and 2 for petrol stations (5541 & 9752)

It can cause confusion for examples like yours, but may also cause other issues, such as a shop showing up as something that the card issuer treats as Cash. e.g. Buying foreign currency at a bank might come under MCC 6010 = Manual Cash on Cash rate, but getting it from M&S might be 6051 = Quasi Cash on Retail rate. It's down to the card issuer how they treat these codes.

I've had a look at some of my old card reciepts, but cannot see anything on them that might give away what the MCC is.

A link if you are interested to a list
http://www.winflexone.com/docs/RLC/RsRf/AD/MerchantCategoryCodes.pdf