Clubcard Pay has been designed with your grocery shopping in mind, to help you manage your shopping budget each month. You can see all of your grocery spending in once place, and connect easily to Tesco Clubcard to see the Clubcard points you’re collecting and maximise your rewards. It’s a debit card that you can use anywhere Visa debit cards are accepted, and you’ll collect Clubcard points on most of your shopping, both in and out of Tesco.
It also comes with a Round Up savings account, which lets you build up your savings pot seamlessly, by rounding up your spending to the nearest £1. This helps you save the change away to use on a rainy day. Your Round Up balance can be transferred out of the account to any other bank account anytime.
You can see and manage both accounts on the Tesco Bank Mobile Banking App.
FAQ specifically says it’s not meant to be used as a main account, and can’t be used for direct debits - but it doesn’t say it’s a pre-paid card anywhere either so I can only assume it’s a proper bank account?
Sounds a bit better than the old plus account from quite a few years ago.
That was limited to Tesco shop only.
Could top up in store or via bank.
Seems they have added Visa aspect.
I am going back probably 10 years though.
The FAQs refer to Topping up Clubcard Pay, which is normally a prepaid card term, however, I concede that the next FAQ goes on about what to do if the account balance is below zero, something that should not be achievable with a prepaid card.
I haven’t seen any mention of Apple or Google Pay, which is very disappointing and hopefully on their roadmap. I must say though, as a new customer of Tesco Bank, the onboarding was very pleasant for a non-fintech. All up and running very quickly, including the credit check.
And a soft search at that. Again makes me think it is a prepaid card.
From their FAQ: Applying for Clubcard Pay won’t affect your credit score, even if your application is unsuccessful. We will carry out a soft search which may appear on your credit file, but this is only visible to you.
Yes. As you say, it’s basically HyperJar but with Clubcard points at all merchants (and no need to scan your Clubcard when shopping at Tesco since they’re automatically applied). This does actually seem to be a proper Visa debit card though, whereas HyperJar use MasterCard Prepaid cards.
EDIT: One other difference between the two is that Tesco Clubcard Pay has a 2.75% non-Sterling transaction fee, as opposed to HyperJar’s fee free forreign spending, so it’s certainly not a card to use for travel
Another thing worth mentioning is that the 1 Clubcard point per £8 at non-Tesco merchants is on a per-transaction basis, so £7.99 at Sainsbury’s, for example, will net you 0 points, £15.99 gets you 21 point, etc.
This looks very interesting. And probably very attractive to club card members who do their main shopping at Tesco.
Tricky thing is getting them to sign up. My mum would save about £15 per is she got club card plus. But she can’t be bothered with signing up. Not worth the hassle apparently.
What was the on boarding process like with this? I’m going to tell her about it and see what she thinks.
Well the application process links to your Clubcard account so can scrape most personal details from there. All I needed to provide was the info regarding how long I have been at my current address, and then confirm some pre-filled contact details. The signing up to Tesco Bank’s online banking followed, and was very painless: pick a username (again, it autofills this with your email), create a password, a security number and some security questions (fake answers stored in Bitwarden ftw!). Then it prompted me to download the Tesco Bank app, I signed in and my account was already listed there, just waiting for my card arrive to activate it. Super easy!
