Your Bank Doesn’t Care About You

If you’ve ever been in the market for a minimalist, front-pocket wallet, you’ve probably heard of the Ridge Wallet. If not, you can learn more about them at Ridge.com.

I would consider them a larger merchant, they do over $100 million a year in revenue, but their long-standing relationship with Chase Bank, and the size of their business, didn’t make it any easier to leverage their Chase Ink Preferred® credit card to pay for online ad spend.

We Were Paying Down Our Chase Card Daily

“We bank with Chase and had a normal Chase credit card with a $100,000 spending limit. We would sometimes spend more than $100,000 a day in online marketing,” says Sean Frank of Ridge Wallet. “To keep our ads running, we were paying off the balance every day and had to switch to a debit card over the weekend so the card wouldn’t get declined. Chase doesn’t process credit card payments on the weekend, so this was the only way we could ensure our ads kept running; because we were spending so much.”

As a cash flow positive company, doing nine figures a year, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect their bank to accommodate their credit card needs, but that wasn’t the case. “Chase is very hard to deal with, like most banks,” said Frank. “Even if you’re doing $20 million or $50 million a year, they really don’t care about your account.”

He suggested that big banks don’t really care about merchants unless they’re doing $1 billion or more a year in annual revenue. “As a result,” he added, “because we were still on the small business platform, we didn’t have anyone looking after us and we just couldn’t get the lines of credit we needed or the spending limits we needed, so we had to build this whole thing without any kind of credit line.”

What Good Is Cash Back Or Points If You Max Out In A Day?

Many providers put restrictive caps on points, or cash back, because they really don’t want to offer them.

“We were wasting credit card points because of the caps on the system. We were using the Chase Ink Preferred for Business card and would get 3% back on our ad spend up to $50,000 a year,” he said, “That ended up being about 12-½ hours of ad spend, so the rest of the year we weren’t making anything.”

He describes the dash.fi card as the perfect solution. “We’re super happy with it. We get way more money in cash back, and it goes straight to our adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization). If we’re trading at 15X revenues, The cash back from dash.fi increases our worth between $15 million and $25 million depending on our ad spend,” says Frank. 

Even if you’re using your points to go on vacation every year, he wonders, “Wouldn’t you really rather have it in cash?”

Why Dash.fi Makes Sense For Ridge Wallet

There’s no question dash.fi makes sense for Ridge Wallet, but Frank also thinks it would be a great credit card for smaller companies too. “I know people who are trying to use something like 12 Amex Gold cards to keep up with their daily ad spend, that’s far too complicated for us,” he says. “And, some of the cards designed to help small businesses are even predatory. They charge 50% APR and take their money first, before anyone else gets paid, so you can’t prioritize a payment.

“If you’re doing seven figures or low eight figures you would enjoy using this card,” he adds. “We do $100s of millions in yearly revenue and we’re staying here. There will be days in 2022 we expect to spend over $1 million a day on advertising. This is how we will make it happen.”

Frank describes the points he was earning from Chase as “measly” and says he really likes the fact that he doesn’t have to worry about spending limits with dash.fi. What’s more, working with Chase and Bank of America to establish more substantial lines of credit is “worse than pulling teeth,” he complains.

Frank suggests if you’re looking for a credit card for ad spend, working with dash.fi is by far the easiest process to go through. “We prefer working with them over our relationship at Chase,” says Frank. “Even though we are a fairly big merchant there, we get horrible support.”

To schedule a demo and learn more about how dash.fi can help your business, visit https://www.dash.fi.


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