What would you value most in an ultra-premium card? Let us know your thoughts below! Such as:
- Travel benefits (Flights, airport lounges, free baggage)
- Local business perks and rewards
- Cashback and loyalty points
Tell us your thoughts below!
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Great travel benefits and insurance coverages. Competitive rewards values/cash back. Ability to transfer to Airlines own membership systems (Aeroplan, Asia Miles, etc.), with a great converting rate!
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Hey @futandrew Great suggestions!! Travel benefits, insurance coverage, and competitive rewards are definitely top priorities in upcoming products… stay tuned!! The ability to transfer to airline partners with a great conversion rate is a fantastic idea too. Thanks for sharing! 
If you haven’t already, you should check this out! World Elite launch - super soon
Airport lounge is the single premium benefit that would make me pay a monthly fee for a credit card.
Free baggage is interesting, but would require making deals across many different air companies. A bit unfeasible to operationalize.
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Lounge access with companions!
Amex platinum is overpriced but the card is metal and the lounge access with a companion makes it worth the money. The Mastercard world elite program uses another lounge system that isn’t bad but doesn’t get you into nearly as many lounges as priority pass.
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Hey Frank, thanks for sharing your thoughts on this! I agree that lounge access is a huge perk associated with the ultra premium card experience, especially when traveling with friends. Right now, our lounge benefit is tied to DragonPass through the World Elite program, which we’re always reviewing to ensure it’s delivering value to our cardholders. While there’s no immediate plan to switch to Priority Pass, its definitely something we’ll keep in mind as we continue to evaluate future offerings. Appreciate you sharing!
Thanks for the feedback! I heavily agree with this - airport lounge is a game changer when traveling. It makes the experience so much more relaxed
Hi Craig,
Great question! I think that each brand has its own unique advantages that its users are drawn to. Because of that, the advantages of an ultra-premium offering by Neo that Neo users would be looking for would be different than the advantages of ultra premium offerings from other brands that users of other brands find appealing. Those users might be in the same income bracket, but they are not the same users.
An important consideration here is that a lot of users who are in the market for an ultra-premium card would already have one or more. I already have two premium cards, and I won’t be getting a third one any time soon if all it offers is the same thing that I get from the ones I already have. Most cards on the market offer the same thing – some rewards in the form of cashback or points, some kind of airline rewards, car rental insurance and the usual. The variation is minimal, and any extra benefits are not worth the extra user fees unless you switch – and switching is a lot of hassle. Like Elon Musk once said, “if you’re entering anything where there’s an existing marketplace, against large, entrenched competitors, then your product or service needs to be much better than theirs. It can’t be a little bit better, because then you put yourself in the shoes of the consumer… you’re always going to buy the trusted brand unless there’s a big difference.”
Competing on cashback would be a good example of an approach where 10x improvement is just not possible. No company can offer cashback that is consistently 10x better than the competition without hurting itself. In Neo’s marketing materials for the upcoming card, I noticed that the difference is purely quantitative and is less than 2x between the worst and the best option presented.
An alternative approach would be to aim for a qualitative difference and try to offer something that the competition can’t offer at all. In that case, the difference is not 5% or $50 or $500, but a radically different experience – a difference between having something with Neo vs not having it at all.
The original card offered by Neo is a good example of a radically different experience. Saving a few bucks by not having monthly fees is nice. Not having to go to the branch? Priceless. You sign up online in minutes, see the balance paid off instantly instead of waiting for days, and view and change your PIN online. Those are basic things but in Canada, they were a game changer.
An ultra premium offering could build on Neo’s known strengths and take user experience to a whole new level that would add so much value that paying any premium required is a no-brainer.
You might consider offering something that would be easy, fast and cheap to build for Neo that would be difficult, slow and expensive to build for your competition.
With a talented, ambitious team Neo can achieve this by staying true to its known strengths and values – caring about users, great design, great user experience, and the technological advantage that competitors can’t match. I don’t know what specific features that make my life easier and more enjoyable would be easy for Neo’s tech teams to build, but there must be something!
Those are the kind of features that I would value most from an ultra premium card from Neo. Instead of getting my own money back as cashback like elsewhere, I’d rather see a much better product that Canadian banks don’t offer with great experience and convenience enabled by superior technology.
For example, imagine a subscription that would autodetect and flag unwanted subscriptions that you can cancel straight from the app, easy bill payments that would pull amounts owed from other providers instead of having to log in to every service with 9000 factor authentication to find out how much you owe, extra time to pay off your balance before the interest kicks in, ability to get early pay, choose your own payday and/or frequency to get paid, a dynamic CVC code to better protect you against fraud, meaningful notifications for upcoming payments so you don’t miss them, customs skins with great designs to choose from to make your card in Apple/Google wallet look fancy and make friends jealous, extra features unlocked to buy things straight from the app, an easy way to donate to charities you like that is designed for exploration, an easy way to pay for parking, local transit, traffic fines, find and buy airline tickets in the app, order food in restaurants straight from the app and a million other things that users in many countries outside of Canada take for granted that are not even considered premium but come for free with standard banking apps.
I know this is more about a premium subscription than a premium card, but Neo is so much more than a card. Cards are leftovers from a bygone era. If we keep thinking about offers in terms of cards, we’ll be forever stuck with faster horses, higher cashback and other vanilla non-creative offerings that haven’t changed for decades.
Hoping to see big breakthroughs! 
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All of the above, plus travel insurance. I would also like to see the addition of a companion (or supplemental) card.
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@Paul this is fantastic feedback, lots of good considerations for the team. You’ve got a very good point competing on cashback alone won’t drive the change in the industry we’re hoping for.
Notice you mentioned you already have two premium cards - out of curiosity, do you have different use cases for each? What drove the decision for each?
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The short answer is yes - and I hope to describe this in greater detail later when I put my thoughts together 
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Great question Craig! I agree with Paul’s thoughts, Neo is in a position to offer the best customer experience - we get a lot of time back when we don’t ever have to visit a branch and any processes can be navigated with ease (applying for a card, requesting changes, making payments, resolving an issue, seamless integration with the rest of the Neo experience, etc). I also think transparency is really helpful - fair processes, no hidden fees, clear and easy-to-understand reward value, avoid moving goalposts; I see there are spend limits but they weren’t easy to look up so making that easier to find would help. Rewards - personally I like cash back rewards since it is guaranteed value every day where the the value of other rewards such as travel perks will be more attractive to some people, or be more attractive at certain points in life. Premium - how will an ultra-premium card differ from (or perhaps include?) the benefits of some of Neo’s available perks such as premium.
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