Who Really Issues the New Bilt Card? The Four-Company Stack Behind Bilt Card 2.0

The new Bilt Card doesn’t work like a normal Chase or Amex product where one bank issues, services, funds, and owns the economics end-to-end. Bilt Card 2.0 is a split stack: Column is the bank and lender of record, Cardless runs servicing and the tech layer, Fidem (and its capital partners) fund receivables, and Bilt provides the rewards program—on Mastercard rails. Once you see the roles, the money flows (interchange, interest, and who gets paid for what) make a lot more sense.

Several readers have asked me about the mechanics of the new Bilt credit card, essentially the plumbing behind the scenes. I haven’t spoken with Bilt or Cardless about this, but I’ve read the press releases and disclosures and things work a little bit differently than they do when you get a new card from Chase or American Express.

If you have a Chase Sapphire, then one entity (Chase) is card issuer, lender, card servicer, capital provider, and rewards program owner. Then the card operates on a payment network, in most cases Visa.

With a Chase United MileagePlus card, Chase is issuer, lender, capital and operations. United owns the rewards currency.

With Bilt’s Wells Fargo card, Wells played the Chase role and Bilt was United.

Bilt Card 2.0 is a split stack, designed with four parties plus the payment network (Mastercard).

• Card issuer. The lender of record – the bank – is Column N.A. and that’s whom the cardholder agreement is with.

  Column also operates a community bank as Northern California National Bank (NorCal). They partner with a number of Fintechs including Brex and Ramp.

• Card servicer. Cardless is the servicer of the Bilt cards. That means they provide things like activation, autopay, transaction management, dispute resolution, and account management.

• Capital provider. Fidem Financial (and its capital partners) fund the receivables. Fidem has acquired over $15 billion in credit card receivables. They partner with Transformco (formerly Seats Holdings) on card origination and servicing for cobrands.

• Rewards program. That’s what Bilt provides.

Normally, here’s how payment works. Money coms in from merchant interchange (card swipe fees), as well as card interest and fees (APR, late fees, etc). Then that would route to the issuer of the program (Column is issuer of record). It gets split contractually across all of the parties.

Cardless gets paid for running the card servicing and tech stack. Fidem and its capital partners get paid a financing return for providing the capital behind the receivables. Bilt gets paid for earned rewards. The commercial settlement (issuer buys points vs revenue-share vs some hybrid) isn’t spelled out publicly. keeps whatever remains after paying for ops (Cardless), capital (Fidem), and rewards (Bilt), plus any bank-level economics (again, exact splits aren’t public).

Ultimately, Column is the card issuer, Cardless provides operations, Fidem provides funding, Bilt provides the loyalty program and Mastercard is the payment network.