Bilt Rewards now offers points for Walgreens spending, regardless of what credit card you use to pay. So this is on top of your normal credit card rewards.

• 1 point per dollar on all purchases
  
• 2 points per dollar on Walgeens-branded items
  
• 100 points per prescription refill (“subject to certain exclusions”)

Wicker Park Walgreens

This comes in addition to a service to help identify tax-favored benefits. They’ll identify Flexible Spending Account and Health Savings Account-eligible purchases. Then they’ll help by transferring funds to your payment card from a linked FSA or HSA payment card.

• The average FSA balance at the end of a year is ~ $455. People don’t spend all their FSA money, and those funds often just revert back to their employer. Identifying purchases that are eligible, and automating reimbursement, is a great feature.

• And for Bilt this puts them in health care, which is over 17% of U.S. GDP. It places them in another large expenditure category alongside rent, though their target demographic may spend less than others in the space.

• This adds greater robustness to Bilt Rewards. Delta SkyMiles isn’t just an airline program or a credit card program though those are its largest components. It’s a restaurant program (Bilt has those partnerships now, too) and a rideshare program (Bilt has this). They don’t have an online shopping portal but they have fitness and now health.

• Drugstores are a popular spend category for many credit card rewards aficionados. Adding a double dip here through Bilt is fantastic.

Bilt says they’ll also be introducing complimentary photo prints as part of the Walgreens partnership.

It’s notable that there’s no benefit to spending at Walgreens on the Bilt credit card. Whatever card you link in your Bilt account and use at Walgreens will trigger the points. I love that you can earn regardless of card, but think it’s a mistake not to find a way to earn more through the branded card.

Given the reported challenges Wells Fargo has gaining non-rent spend on its Bilt card portfolio, they may be reticent to spend more money on Bilt members. On the other hand it’s in Bilt’s long-term interest to ensure that their co-brand card portfolio is as successful as possible.

If I were them I’d leverage partnership like Walgreens, Lyft, and others to encourage incremental spend on the product – even if Wells was unwilling to cover points cost. This will make the portfolio more attractive at 2029’s renewal time, whether for Wells or marketing to another issuer. Still, it has to be done within budget constraints. So I’d probably run targeted offers to Bilt cardmembers who redeem their points in low cost ways like rent and Amazon, rather than travel and points transfers. (It is possible, of course, that bonusing co-brand card spend was somehow precluded by the partnership, as a result of terms of the myWalgreens Credit Card deal.) The Walgreens loyalty program, incidentally, was launched a dozen years ago by former MileagePlus head Graham Atkinson.