Is there a “fair” way of nerfing a credit card?

2025 has been a pretty crappy year for premium credit cards, all things considered.

Whether it’s the AMEX Platinum Charge doubling the work required to use its Platinum Statement Credits, or the Citi Prestige cutting unlimited lounge visits while raising the annual fee, or the UOB Visa Infinite Metal Card quietly adding a 4-hour cooldown that effectively limits lounge visits to once per flight, it’s been one downgrade after another. 

🔻 Premium Card Nerfs Announced in 2025
Card	Nerfs
AMEX Platinum Charge Apply	Platinum Statement Credits now issued half-yearly Unlimited Priority Pass visits for 1st supplementary cardholder cut to 8x visits
Citi Prestige Apply	Unlimited Priority Pass visits cut to 12x visits Complimentary travel insurance coverage reduced Annual fee hiked to S$651.82
DBS Vantage Card Apply	No more S$60K spend path to annual fee waiver from 1 August 2026
Maybank Visa Infinite Apply	Complimentary miles conversions removed JetQuay access removed No more points for charitable donations
UOB Visa Infinite Metal Card Apply	4-hour cooldown between lounge visits added Unlimited Priority Pass visits removed, replaced by 12x visits from 1 June 2026

Now, it’s one thing if a card doesn’t have an annual fee, or if the fee can be easily waived. It’s another thing entirely if the annual fee is mandatory.

If you just received or renewed your card, you paid the annual fee with the expectation of enjoying a certain set of perks for a year. If the bank cuts them halfway through, isn’t that a bit of a rug pull?

And that’s got me thinking: is there a “fair” way of nerfing a card?

Banks have broad discretion to nerf card perks

Let me start by saying that no one expects a card to remain the same forever. Sooner or later, changes will have to be made, whether due to cost pressures, partnership changes, or consumer behaviour. 

At the same time, however, customers have every right to expect such changes to be communicated transparently, with adequate notice. The question then is: how much notice is adequate?

Unfortunately, the fine print in most credit card agreements gives the banks wide discretion to change the terms at any time— even without notice!

If it’s any consolation, just because they can change the T&Cs without notice doesn’t mean they will. I know it’s hard to believe, but banks don’t deliberately try to piss off their customers (well, most of them anyway).

In practice, most banks will abide by the ABS Code of Consumer Banking Practice, which states that customers should be informed 30 days before the implementation of any changes. Banks will sometimes even go beyond this threshold, like Citi did when it gave two months’ notice of the Citi Prestige’s annual fee hike and reduction in lounge visits.

But is that enough? 

Suppose it’s the start of April 2025, and you’ve just made the decision to renew your Citi Prestige Card for S$545. But at the end of the month, Citi tells you that from July 2025, your unlimited lounge visits will be cut to just 12.

I imagine you’d be ticked, to put it mildly. You paid S$545 expecting 12 months of unlimited lounge access, not just three. Had you known about the nerf, you might have decided not to renew your card in the first place!

Is there a better way?

So with that in mind, is there a more equitable way for banks to make changes to credit cards, especially those with mandatory annual fees?

I can think of some possibilities, but I’m going to tell you upfront that I don’t know what the best solution is. While each of these has some appealing aspects, they also have the potential to create even more problems. 

Delay implementation till the next membership year

In an ideal world, any changes would not take place until the start of the cardholder’s next membership year. This way, no one could argue that they weren’t aware of the changed circumstances when they paid their annual fee.

In other words, credit cards would be treated like “editions.” All changes for a given year would be bundled into one version — say, the 2026/27 edition — with any further updates deferred to the following year’s release. That way, cardholders could clearly see what’s new each year and make an informed decision about whether to renew.

Of course that’s easier said than done, and administration would be a nightmare.

Every customer has a different renewal date, so instead of one clean “switchover” date, you’d need your system to support both old and new benefit sets concurrently. External partners would also need to mirror this timing logic, and it’s a surefire recipe for confusion, because different cardmembers would be enjoying different benefits concurrently.

Besides, there’s really no incentive for banks to do things this way. Not only do they lose the ability to make swift product-wide changes, it creates a ton of additional work on the operations side, and will make it a pain to plan budgets or coordinate with vendors.

Give 12 months’ notice of all changes

Related to the first point— but perhaps slightly easier to implement — is the notion that banks provide 12 months’ notice of any major change. 

For example, the DBS Vantage Card announced in August 2025 that from August 2026, it would no longer be possible to waive the annual fee with S$60,000 spend per year. 

That’s fair enough in my opinion, because it provided a full year of notice for customers to factor this change into their spending decisions. Had the policy taken effect the following month, for instance, it would satisfy the letter of the 30-day requirement, but still be grossly unfair to cardholders who had been diligently spending over their past membership year, in the belief they were working towards an annual fee waiver.

But this kind of runway is not always possible, especially if the nerf is meant to address abuse (I’m not keen to get drawn into a discussion as to what constitutes abuse, so if it goes down better, read it as “what the bank sees as abuse”).

For example, I don’t see any way the Citi Prestige could have provided a 12-month notification of the Priority Pass nerf, not when the entire purpose was to deal with, shall we say, overexuberant usage. And before someone points out that the UOB Visa Infinite Metal Card provided a 12-month notification for the removal of unlimited lounge visits, let’s remember that they quietly introduced a 4-hour cooldown in April 2025, which dramatically limits the scope for abuse.

Furthermore, it’s a matter of opinion as to what constitutes a “major change”, and there are some things which simply don’t lend themselves to a 12-month timeline, like modifications to earn rates, revisions to bonus caps, or the addition or removal or bonus categories. 

Have a grandfather tier for existing customers

One way to limit cardholder dissatisfaction with product changes is to create a “grandfather tier,” where existing cardholders keep their current benefits, and only new applicants are subject to the revised terms.

For instance, when American Express ended its “one annual fee” policy in November 2022, it grandfathered existing Platinum Charge cardmembers, so they could continue enjoying a perpetual fee waiver on the AMEX Platinum Reserve.

While this sounds ideal in theory, maintaining grandfather tiers is complex in practice. It effectively means running two parallel systems indefinitely, each with its own benefit structures, eligibility rules, and billing setup. And if you have a further change down the road, do you create yet another grandfather tier? Either way, ensuring the correct rules apply to each account will become increasingly complicated.

There are also challenges with third-party partnerships, such as lounge access, insurance, or concierge services, which are often priced per cardholder. Preserving a grandfather tier would require keeping old commercial agreements active, even after vendors have moved to new pricing models.

Finally, having two versions of the same product can blur its identity, confuse customers, and increase the workload for customer service teams, especially when newer customers discover that older ones enjoy better perks.

Provide a pro-rated refund of the remaining annual fee

Hahahahahahahahahah.

Like that would ever happen. 

Seriously though, while it would be wonderful if banks agreed to provide a pro-rated annual fee refund for any disgruntled customers, this would simply open up a whole other can of worms.

How big of a change would be sufficient to warrant a refund? How would you deal with benefits that have already been fully consumed at the point the refund is requested, such as lounge visits or travel credits? And how would the bank be able to properly allocate budgets and resources for a given card when partial refunds are in the picture?

Besides, once then bank sets a precedent that customers can get a pro-rated refund if they dislike a change, they risk encouraging refund requests every time perks are adjusted, even for “minor” changes. I imagine that’s something they’d prefer to avoid.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, there’s probably no “perfect” way of nerfing a card. Banks want flexibility to manage costs and partnerships, customers want predictability and fair notice. Those two goals are often in tension.

Unfortunately, every time you pay an annual fee, you always run the risk of not being able to enjoy the stated benefits for the full 12 months.

If that’s something which causes you to lose sleep at night, then you should stick to cards with fee waivers, or maybe one that charges fees by the month instead of annually (like the DCS Flex Card, though I don’t think it’s worth paying for in the first place!).

What would be a “fair” way of nerfing a card?