Easy bonus: GrabPay offering up to 15,000 GrabRewards points for making online transactions

From now till October 2020, Grab is running a promotion called “Power Up”, which allows GrabPay users to earn up to 15,000 bonus GrabRewards points per month when they use their GrabPay Mastercard or GrabPay Wallet for online transactions. 

This presents some great opportunities for double dipping, assuming you have the right credit card. 

GrabPay’s Power Up promotion

Here’s how GrabPay’s Power Up promotion works. There are three promotion periods, which run from the 14th of each month to the 13th of the month after, i.e:

• Period 1: 14 July to 13 August 2020 
• Period 2: 14 August to 13 September 2020
• Period 3: 14 September to 13 October 2020

During each of these periods, GrabPay users who spend at least S$500 or S$1,000 on online transactions will earn 5,000 or 15,000 bonus points, capped at 8,000 and 2,000 users per promotion period. 

Each user is only entitled to receive one bonus per month, i.e if you spend S$1,200, you get 15,000 bonus points, not 15,000 + 5,000. 

Bonus GrabRewards points will be credited to your Grab account within 14 working days from the last day of each monthly period. GrabRewards points received under this promotion do not count towards elite tier progression. 

Are there any spending exclusions?

Grab is excluding two MCCs from this campaign:

• MCC 6300: Insurance sales, underwriting and premiums
• MCC 9399: Government services

That’s a shame, because paying off an insurance premium (which wouldn’t earn points by using a credit card anyway) would be a great way of hitting the minimum spending. 

What does this mean for the GrabPay Card?

I mentioned there were double dipping opportunities here, because it’s still possible to earn points when topping up your GrabPay balance with certain cards:

• DBS Altitude Visa: 1.2 mpd
• Citi PremierMiles Visa: 1.2 mpd
• Citi Rewards Visa: 4 mpd

Note how I’ve highlighted Visa- you won’t get any points if you top up with the AMEX/ Mastercard versions of these cards. 

As you probably already know, Grab devalued its rewards program and KrisFlyer miles transfers earlier this year. You now earn GrabRewards points as follows:

10 GrabRewards points = 1 KrisFlyer mile, so spending with GrabPay represents an effective earn rate of 0.2-0.4 mpd.

That sounds awful, until you remember that credit cards and GrabPay are not an either/or proposition (yet). You can earn up to 4 mpd on your top-up anyway, so GrabRewards points are just the icing on the cake. 

Assuming you manage to be within the first 8,000 (S$500) or 2,000 (S$1,000) users, you’re looking at a return of 5.4-5.9 mpd, which is none too shabby considering it’s no additional effort from your part. 

Alternatively, if you want to redeem your GrabRewards points for Grab ride vouchers (2500 points= S$5), this bonus represents an incremental rebate of 2-3%. 

Conclusion

With the high level of GrabPay adoption, I wouldn’t be surprised if the cap is quickly exhausted. If you have online spending to do, get it done ASAP. 

The full T&C of this promotion can be found at the bottom of this page.