The Milelion’s Guide to Credit Card Points

Which bank pools points? When do points expire? What's the conversion fee? All this answered and more.

Unless you hold a cobrand card like the AMEX KrisFlyer Ascend or KrisFlyer Blue, you’re not actually earning miles when you spend- you’re earning bank points. Bank points can then be transferred to frequent flyer programs such as KrisFlyer or Asia Miles.

That means there’s an additional layer to understand here in the form of the various bank currencies.ย So I’ve put together the following table with the 8 banks in Singapore whose currencies can be converted to airline miles.

Click to enlarge

A few points to note about the table above:

  • DBS offers customer two options for conversion. Cardholders either pay $26.75 per conversion, or $42.80 for their points to be automatically converted once the minimum threshold is reached
  • UOB offers customers two options for conversion. Cardholders either pay $25 per conversion, or $50 per year, for their points to be automatically converted in blocks of 5,000 miles at the end of each month
  • SCB does not pool points, unless it’s for conversion to KrisFlyer. In other words, the SCB VI’s points cannot be used to redeem for any of the X Card’s 11 new transfer partners
  • Citibank points expire 5 years (+3 months) after the card on which they were earned was opened. That’s to say, if your card was opened in May 2018, all your points earned on that card will expire Aug 2023. Confused? Read this

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Aaron Wong
Aaron Wong
Aaron founded The Milelion to help people travel better for less and impress chiobu. He was 50% successful.

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Yi Kai

Um, the click to enlarge button don’t work.

Awesome article by the way. Bookmarking it.

ned

Hi Aaron, excellent article as always.

The conversion fee is waived for maybank world master card through the complimentary Rewards Infinite membership. For the rare few peeps who employs maybank cards as part of their strategy.

Lee

Correct me if I am wrong but I thought miles earned thru Citi PM never expires?

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[…] that your bank points transfer at the same ratio regardless of which FFP you choose. That’s to say, if I hold a […]

LionDen

The table above when clicked to enlarge, became a black screen with only the banks’ logo visible on it, details within cannot be read.
Think it’s something to do with the formatting…

LionDen

I am using Chrome browser. Tried your advice to refresh webpage, and I also tried it on incognito mode. Still cannot view the table in enlarged form. It is all black except the bank logos.However I can make out the very faint outlines of the table and very faint wordings. I wish I can screen shot it to show you what I see. I think its because you use black fonts on black background in the table?

LionDen

have you made any changes? if you have, its still the same for me unfortunately. I tried with Windows IE browser, it works. This is before you make any changes to the png format.
Dont worry about it. I am able to view it enlarged in IE.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge.