Altitude Reserve Rewards problem

[Anonymous]

I have been paying some large vet bills lately (with mobile wallet) and I just checked the reward tracker on US Bank's site.   To my surprise/horror/disgust I saw all my transactions since Jan 1 have been earning 1x.  I chatted with an agent which said it won't show 3x till the statement closes, which wasn't quite my memory, but OK.

Then I realized that several of these transactions in early Jan were on a closed statement, so I called.   I was told it is a known issue, and all mobile wallet transactions since Jan 1 are miscategorized and they are working hard to fix it.   And she promised that I would get credit.

Still, a little concerned that if it takes a while, they might decide some things aren't wallet or whatever.  I would also think this shouldn't be too hard to fix as presumably it is a very specific part of the code (Did someone put "If date < 20240101 then walletmultiplier=3 else walletmultiplier=1"  !?)

[SpaethCo]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Still, a little concerned that if it takes a while, they might decide some things aren't wallet or whatever.  I would also think this shouldn't be too hard to fix as presumably it is a very specific part of the code (Did someone put "If date < 20240101 then walletmultiplier=3 else walletmultiplier=1"  !?)

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The rewards section of the portal that shows the earnings per transaction hasn't had its first birthday yet. I think part of the reason for the delay despite this card being around since 2017 is that the points aren't tallied in US Bank's system quite how you'd expect.  Those 3x points are earned as 1x on the rounded dollar amount of the transaction, and then 2x of the rounded sum of all of the transactions with that same merchant on the same day when the bonus conditions apply (ie, MCC code of travel, originated via Device Account Number and not the card number).

As I understand it, there is a daily batch process that assigns 1x base points to all of the transactions, and then there are separate batch processes for the "awards" points which are grouped into different buckets. Years ago this only used to be run just before statement cut, but recently there have been some updates to run it more frequently and sum up the bonus points per merchant per day.

Based on my past experience with these kind of systems, most likely they had a batch process failure for a grouping of Device Account Numbers (DAN)s after the 1st of the year and now after re-running and re-scheduling that job that assigns the bonus points some accounts are running past a cutoff deadline and now the bonus points have a rolling different posting date from the base 1x point earning.

The portal has to do a lot of heavy lifting to "glue" these points back together to display the earned amount.  For example, the system gets confused about how to divide out the bonus points bucket and allocate them to the base transactions when you have multiple transactions with the same merchant on the same day. I think the problem here is that if the bonus points and base points have different dates the portal won't be able to match them up at all.

When your statement cuts, however, they'll just reported the journaled total in each of the buckets on your statement.  With the system setup this way your statement could be 93-100% correct (ie, it might be missing a day or two of crediting from the bonus batch) even while the portal can't figure out how to assemble the points back together into an accurate earning display.

[GhostCredit]

Is this just the Altitude Reserve or on all US Bank cards? 

[Curious_George2]

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@SpaethCo wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:

Still, a little concerned that if it takes a while, they might decide some things aren't wallet or whatever.  I would also think this shouldn't be too hard to fix as presumably it is a very specific part of the code (Did someone put "If date < 20240101 then walletmultiplier=3 else walletmultiplier=1"  !?)

---

The rewards section of the portal that shows the earnings per transaction hasn't had its first birthday yet. I think part of the reason for the delay despite this card being around since 2017 is that the points aren't tallied in US Bank's system quite how you'd expect.  Those 3x points are earned as 1x on the rounded dollar amount of the transaction, and then 2x of the rounded sum of all of the transactions with that same merchant on the same day when the bonus conditions apply (ie, MCC code of travel, originated via Device Account Number and not the card number).

As I understand it, there is a daily batch process that assigns 1x base points to all of the transactions, and then there are separate batch processes for the "awards" points which are grouped into different buckets. Years ago this only used to be run just before statement cut, but recently there have been some updates to run it more frequently and sum up the bonus points per merchant per day.

Based on my past experience with these kind of systems, most likely they had a batch process failure for a grouping of Device Account Numbers (DAN)s after the 1st of the year and now after re-running and re-scheduling that job that assigns the bonus points some accounts are running past a cutoff deadline and now the bonus points have a rolling different posting date from the base 1x point earning.

The portal has to do a lot of heavy lifting to "glue" these points back together to display the earned amount.  For example, the system gets confused about how to divide out the bonus points bucket and allocate them to the base transactions when you have multiple transactions with the same merchant on the same day. I think the problem here is that if the bonus points and base points have different dates the portal won't be able to match them up at all.

When your statement cuts, however, they'll just reported the journaled total in each of the buckets on your statement.  With the system setup this way your statement could be 93-100% correct (ie, it might be missing a day or two of crediting from the bonus batch) even while the portal can't figure out how to assemble the points back together into an accurate earning display.

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This guy codes. 

[Ghoshida]

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@Anonymous wrote:

I have been paying some large vet bills lately (with mobile wallet) and I just checked the reward tracker on US Bank's site.   To my surprise/horror/disgust I saw all my transactions since Jan 1 have been earning 1x.  I chatted with an agent which said it won't show 3x till the statement closes, which wasn't quite my memory, but OK.

Then I realized that several of these transactions in early Jan were on a closed statement, so I called.   I was told it is a known issue, and all mobile wallet transactions since Jan 1 are miscategorized and they are working hard to fix it.   And she promised that I would get credit.

Still, a little concerned that if it takes a while, they might decide some things aren't wallet or whatever.  I would also think this shouldn't be too hard to fix as presumably it is a very specific part of the code (Did someone put "If date < 20240101 then walletmultiplier=3 else walletmultiplier=1"  !?)

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Thank you for highlighting this issue. I vaguely remembering seeing the 1x coding earlier this month and hoping that by statement time, it will be ok. Then I never checked until today and saw that my statement didn't code $600+ spend between Jan 1 and Jan 10 (after which my statement is generated) as 3X mobile spend, and has not been coding them since. Now this card doesn't ever see the light of the day despite how nice it feels. It stays in the Apple Wallet section of two iPhones.

I'm chatting with a Cust Serv Rep on this and they're raising a ticket. Let me see what I hear from them. If they have somehow managed to kill the mobile wallet 3X feature then it's an immediate chopping block candidate. 

[SpaethCo]

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@Ghoshida wrote:

Thank you for highlighting this issue. I vaguely remembering seeing the 1x coding earlier this month and hoping that by statement time, it will be ok. Then I never checked until today and saw that my statement didn't code $600+ spend between Jan 1 and Jan 10 (after which my statement is generated) as 3X mobile spend, and has not been coding them since. Now this card doesn't ever see the light of the day despite how nice it feels. It stays in the Apple Wallet section of two iPhones/

For clarity, when you look at your statement (usually page 3) where it has Rewards Earned, are you short points in the "2 Extra Points: Mobile Wallet" category on your statement, or is it just the 1x display on the portal?

Like on my Janurary 5th statement the math all checks out despite a bunch of purchases showing 1x on the portal:

For what it's worth, it appears that deleting and re-adding your card to Apple / Google Pay will resolve the display issue in the portal because you'll get issued a new virtual device account number that will likely be outside of the "problematic" batch group, and your base + bonus points will start having the same dates again.

[Anonymous]

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@SpaethCo wrote:

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Like on my Janurary 5th statement the math all checks out despite a bunch of purchases showing 1x on the portal:

For what it's worth, it appears that deleting and re-adding your card to Apple / Google Pay will resolve the display issue in the portal because you'll get issued a new virtual device account number that will likely be outside of the "problematic" batch group, and your base + bonus points will start having the same dates again.

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My Jan 12th statement defintely is giving 1x on the purchases since Jan 1.

[SpaethCo]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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My Jan 12th statement defintely is giving 1x on the purchases since Jan 1.

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I wouldn't have expected that, I wonder what happened that your account is so far behind on crediting.  I guess I'd prioritize removing / re-adding the card to your mobile wallet in the short term then because that definitely fixed the 3x reporting on my account (and a few other poeple on reddit, it seems?).

[xenon3030]

Since early Jan, my AR card shows several issues including not triggering 3X (Google Pay) and also not sending SMS after transactions to be able to redeem RTR points. For the payments with Google Pay, it says that the card was manually entered. I hope that they can fix the issues soon. My main motivation to get this card was using it for digital wallet and redeem RTR.

Btw, is it possible to get the transaction history from Google Pay? 

[Anonymous]

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@Ghoshida wrote:

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I'm chatting with a Cust Serv Rep on this and they're raising a ticket. Let me see what I hear from them. If they have somehow managed to kill the mobile wallet 3X feature then it's an immediate chopping block candidate. 

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Did they open a ticket?