Platinum Rewards Cardmember Agreement

The Platinum Rewards Cardmember Agreement 10 19 2018 filing from Amalgamated Bank of Chicago sets out a purchase APR of 14.9%–24.9%, no annual fee and a 12-month 0% opening period. Against the 4,587 filings on this site, that rate lands around the 60th percentile.

What this filing discloses

Amalgamated Bank of Chicago submitted the terms for Platinum Rewards Cardmember Agreement 10 19 2018 to the CFPB's agreement database; this is what they contain. The filing runs 12 pages.

The filing is explicit about a purchase rate, a cash advance rate, a balance transfer rate, an annual fee line and a late payment maximum. It is silent on a penalty rate and a foreign transaction fee.

The promotional period

This agreement opens at 0% for 12 months, the only period in the document where carrying a balance is free.

Roughly 458 of the 4,587 filings indexed here disclose a zero-percent introductory rate, so this is a real feature of the document but not a rare one.

The go-to rate is 24.9%. Any balance still outstanding when the promotion lapses starts accruing at that figure — about $1,413 a year on $5,000.

Valued honestly, 12 months at zero on $5,000 avoids about $1,413 of interest compared with the go-to rate — the whole of what the promotion delivers.

How the purchase rate compares

The purchase APR is quoted as a range of 14.9% to 24.9%. That 10-point spread is the whole of what the filing commits to; the method for assigning a rate inside it is not in the document.

Read against the index, the low end ranks around the 32nd percentile and the high end around the 60th — the band straddles a wide stretch of the market this corpus describes.

The filing marks this rate as variable, which means it moves with the index the agreement names rather than staying where it is quoted today.

This figure is the post-promotional rate. The introductory pricing is handled separately further down.

The cost of carrying a balance

The purchase rate turns a $2,500 revolving balance into roughly $707 of annual interest.

The median purchase rate across the corpus is 21.99%; the same balance there would cost about $615. The gap — roughly $92 a year on $2,500 — is the price of this particular filing over a typical one.

Treat this as an illustration of what the disclosed rate does, not as a projection of a real account, which would be shaped by payments and by the fees described elsewhere in the filing.

The fee structure

There is no annual fee. That is the common case in this corpus — about 75% of the filings that disclose an annual fee at all disclose it as $0 — so it is a baseline expectation rather than a distinguishing feature.

Cash advances carry a cash advance fee of $10 or 5% of the advance, whichever is greater and a cash advance APR of 26.99%. Cash is therefore 2.09 points dearer than buying something with the card. $200 is the crossover point where the percentage overtakes the $10 minimum. The grace period described below generally does not extend to cash advances, so interest on them usually begins immediately.

Balance transfers cost 3% of the amount transferred up front and then accrue at 14.9%. On $2,000 that fee is about $60 before any interest is charged.

Default pricing

$35 is the disclosed ceiling on a late payment fee, placing it near the 54th percentile of the set.

The no-interest path

Anyone clearing the statement balance inside 25 days pays no purchase interest at all under this filing.

What is outside the disclosure

Absent from the captured terms: a foreign transaction fee and penalty pricing. The original document is the place to look for any of these.

It is worth being explicit about scope: these filings record terms and pricing. They say nothing about rewards programmes, cardholder benefits, promotional offers or who the issuer will approve, and this review does not speculate about any of it.

Reading the agreement yourself

The original filing, 12 pages long, is linked on this page and should be read before any figure here is acted on. It is also a snapshot: issuers refile as terms change.

In short

The pricing here is middling by the standards of the index — 24.9% on purchases is near enough to typical.