How To Get >5% Cashback For Your Telco Bills

There are many different credit cards which offer cash rebates when you charge your Telco bills to the card. Some of the banks even have a card specially for a particular Telco (they call it the co-branded cards). These cards would require the Telco bills to be charged directly to the credit card every month (through credit card GIRO) in order to enjoy the higher cash rebates. If you are living in Singapore, most likely you are paying bills to either of the 3 Telco companies (i.e. Singtel, M1 and StarHub). (I put StarHub last because I believe 10 years down the road, it will have the smallest share of consumers among the 3 Telcos.)

For Singtel, we have the Singtel-UOB Platinum card. As the name implies, this card is only offered by UOB.

This card offers cash rebate of about 1% -6% of your Singtel bill. But considering that only very few people have monthly bills of $500 and above, we shall ignore the last category for this discussion. So this card would ultimately offers cash rebate of about 1% to 3.33% for your Singtel bills.

For M1, there is the Citibank M1 Platinum Visa Card. This card is offered by Citibank.

The cash rebates that one can earn from this card is as follows:

It offers a cash rebate of 1.5% to 2.5% for your M1 bills, which is less than the 3.33% offered by Singtel-UOB Platinum Card if you are spending more than $300 for your Telco bill, but more than the 1% offered by Singtel-UOB Platinum Card if your monthly Telco bill is below $50.


If your Telco is StarHub, then sad to say that there is currently no co-branded card with any bank yet.


Of course, you may choose other cash rebate cards, like Standard Chartered SingPost Platinum Visa Credit Card (which offers 7% if you pay your bills online). However, do note that this card requires a minimum spend of $600 per month in order to enjoy the cashback.

 

If you are using StarHub and not spending a lot each month, you may consider using Maybank Platinum Visa Card instead to chalk up the rebates.

As discussed thus far, we can see that most cards offer less than 5% cash rebates for your Telco bills. So how do we actually get that elusive >5% cashback?

The answer is easy.

First of all, you would need to have a BOC Family Card from Bank of China. This card already offers a 1% cash rebate when you charge your Telco bills to this card. However, this method is not really recommended as it is not really significant.

Secondly, you would need to have a NETS Flashpay card and register for the Auto Top-Up (ATU) feature to allow the auto top-up through your BOC Family Card  (or you can also register for the NETS Flashpay ATU function using your BOC Family Card (which is also a NETS Flashpay card) if you do not have a NETS Flashpay card, but do note that a $0.25 will be charged by BOC for every ATU transaction). Do note that a $0.25 convenience fee will be charged by NETS for each ATU transaction. The link to register for ATU is here: https://atu.nets.com.sg/schemeatu/showreg.action

Lastly, pay your Telco bills using NETS Flashpay through one of the SAM kiosks you can find near you. This will effectively allow you to qualify for the 5% cash rebate for NETS Flashpay Auto Top Up (first 4 top ups), as you are depleting the funds in your NETS Flashpay and thus quicken the pace of ATU.

But wait! You may ask, "Hey, so that's just 5%, and some more there is a convenience fee being charged by NETS / BOC, which makes it less than 5%!"

This is where the trick comes in... The trick to obtain more than 5% is to continue to use your existing cards (be it UOB, Citibank, Maybank or Standard Chartered). After which, pay your credit card bills using NETS Flashpay through any of the SAM kiosk. This way, besides earning the cashback for paying your Telco bills using your credit card, you also get to qualify for the 5% cash rebate for NETS Flashpay Auto Top Up. So that makes it more than 5% cash rebates for your Telco bills!

For example, for a monthly Telco bill of $42, rebates for the different cards would be as follows:
1) Singtel-UOB Platinum Card: 1% + 5%
2) Citibank M1 Platinum Visa Card: 1.5% + 5%
3) SingPost Platinum Visa Card: 7% + 5% (minimum spend of $600 per month is required)
4) Maybank Platinum Visa Card: 3.33% + 5% (minimum spend of $300 per month for each quarter)

So there you have it. This is how you get >5% cashback for your Telco bills!