“No Exclusions” cards: What do they really exclude?

While some cards may claim to have no rewards exclusions, the very title of this post should tell you that “no exclusions” is a big fat lie.

In reality, every card needs to have at least some exclusions, otherwise people would manufacture spend it into oblivion. I mean, if you ever need a case study of what happens when you really try to offer a no-exclusions card, just ask Chocolate Finance.

That’s why these claims are always tempered by a caveat tucked into the fine print, or an “almost” slipped into the marketing copy.

Still, it is true that some cards have relatively fewer exclusions than others, and even offer rewards on commonly-excluded categories like education and utilities.

In this post, we’ll look at the three most prominent examples, and see how well they live up to the “no exclusions” claim.

Which categories are usually excluded from rewards?

Certain categories of merchants enjoy lower card processing fees, such as charitable organisations, government departments, hospitals and insurers. Since these transactions generate less revenue for banks, they are typically excluded from earning rewards.

Here’s a bank-by-bank rundown of some commonly-excluded categories.

However, these exclusions are not absolute. In some cases, banks carve out certain exceptions for selected — usually premium — cards (for example, the UOB Reserve Card still earns miles on education, even though regular UOB cards don’t).

In others, banks create a separate product whose entire selling point is the absence of such exclusions. These are the “no exclusion” cards, which we’ll now look at in detail.

Which cards offer “no exclusions”?

AMEX True Cashback Card

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❌ Earns 1.5% cashback on everything except…

GrabPay and other stored value facility top-ups SimplyGo

The AMEX True Cashback Card offers 1.5% cashback on everything, except for GrabPay (excluded April 2023) and SimplyGo (excluded May 2025). There is no minimum spend required, and no cap.

While other American Express cards have excluded charitable donations, education, insurance, public hospitals, and utilities, the AMEX True Cashback Card has managed to dodge these exclusions (unfortunately, it wasn’t able to dodge the loss of AMEX Pay!).

Perhaps the biggest “exclusion” is the relatively limited AMEX acceptance across Singapore.

Chocolate Visa Debit Card

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❌ Earns 1 Max Mile per S$1 on everything except…

GrabPay and other stored value facility top-ups Financial institutions and money transfers

The Chocolate Visa Debit Card earns:

• 1 Max Mile per S$1 on the first S$1,000 spent per calendar month
• 0.4 Max Miles per S$1 on all subsequent spending, without cap.

However, there are two exceptions. 

Chocolate excludes AXS payments (ha!), and MCCs which give rise to manufactured spending concerns such as prepaid account top-ups.

Chocolate also carves out a separate category of MCCs it calls “bill payments”, and caps cardholders at earning a maximum of 100 Max Miles per calendar month from such transactions.

I say “bill payments” because despite the name, not everything here fits the bill (sorry). 

For example, MCC 7399 is considered a bill payment, and while it is used by CardUp, it’s also used by a lot of merchants which aren’t remotely connected to bill payments, such as Points.com. This means you’re capped at 100 Max Miles when buying miles or points from Aeroplan, Alaska, Flying Blue, GHA, Hilton, IHG, Marriott, Qatar Airways, United and any other airline or hotel which uses the platform.

MCC 7399 can also pop up in unexpected places, like when you’re making cash + points bookings with IHG (which I guess makes sense, since you’re conceptually buying additional points), or even Shopee.

Because of this, I’d highly recommend checking the MCC if there’s even a shadow of a doubt. 

UOB Absolute Cashback Card

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❌ Earns 1.7% cashback on everything except…

Charitable donations (0.3%) Government services (0.3%) GrabPay top-ups (0.3%) Healthcare (0.3%) Utilities (0.3%) Professional services (0.3%)

When the UOB Absolute Cashback Card launched in 2021, its major selling point was 1.7% cashback on everything— no cap, and no spend exclusions. And to their credit, they really meant it.

Everything was fair game. UOB even explicitly mentioned insurance premiums, school fees, wallet top-ups, healthcare, utilities and rental as examples of categories cardholders could earn cashback on!

In fact, the main “exclusion” was on the merchant side. As an American Express card, this suffered from the usual limitations vis a vis merchant acceptance. But there was an easy workaround— all you had to do was top-up your GrabPay wallet with the UOB Absolute Cashback Card, then use the GrabPay Mastercard to spend, thereby “converting” an AMEX into a Mastercard.

That felt a little too good to be true, so it perhaps wasn’t surprising that in January 2023, the cashback rate for GrabPay top-ups was cut to 0.3%.

What really annoyed me though, was when UOB decided to further nerf the cashback rate for charitable donations, education, government, healthcare, utilities, and professional services to 0.3% as well, in May 2024.

Is 0.3% better than nothing? Yes. Is 0.3% practically nothing? Also yes. This was basically UOB’s standard exclusions list (with some additions!), just dressed up differently.

Now, I’m sure UOB will argue that these transactions aren’t excluded; they just earn a lower cashback rate. But this comes off as a disingenuous attempt to play with semantics. After all, what’s to stop a bank from advertising a “no exclusions” card that pays 0.00001% cashback on categories it doesn’t really want to reward? At some point, the reward becomes so negligible that it’s indistinguishable from an exclusion.

Rating the claims

So how do these three cards stack up on their “no exclusions” claim?

The way I see it, the AMEX True Cashback Card comes the closest, since it basically has only two exceptions: prepaid account top-ups and SimplyGo. Everything else, whether it’s government agencies, school fees, hospitals, insurance or utilities, is eligible for 1.5% cashback.

In contrast, the Chocolate Visa Debit Card and UOB Absolute Cashback Card play fast and loose, because certain categories either have such a low earning cap (Chocolate) or low earn rate (Absolute) that they’re functionally exclusions. It makes me wonder how far you can really push these marketing claims!

That said, when it comes to day-to-day usability, the Chocolate Visa Debit Card may actually be the most practical, thanks to Visa’s wider acceptance. You’re not going to find a lot of schools, insurers, government agencies or utilities companies that accept American Express, and what good is a no-exclusions card that you can’t even use?

But if you get lucky, then the AMEX True Cashback Card would generally win on exclusion categories, offering 1.5% to the UOB Absolute Cashback Card’s 0.3% (of course for general spending, the Absolute’s 1.7% easily wins).

Alternatively, if you really want to earn miles on these transactions and don’t mind paying an admin fee, then CardUp, Citi PayAll and SC EasyBill would be options worth exploring.

Welcome offers

AMEX True Cashback Card

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New-to-AMEX customers who receive approval for an AMEX True Cashback Card by 30 September 2025 will receive a S$160 eCapitaVoucher when they spend at least S$500 within the first 30 days of approval.

UOB Absolute Cashback Card

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New-to-UOB customers who apply for a UOB Absolute Cashback Card by 30 September 2025 can choose from either S$60 cash or S$70 Shopee vouchers when they spend at least S$500 within 30 days of approval. 

Conclusion

“No exclusions” may sound enticing, but at the end of the day it’s more of a marketing slogan than a hard truth. Some cards may come close, but there will always be fine print that limits your rewards in one way or another.

The key is knowing which exclusions (or pseudo-exclusions) matter to your spending habits, and picking the right card based on that.

What other no exclusions cards can you think of?