Currensea's New Whitepaper Says UK Loyalty Belongs to Debit Cards

Currensea published The Reinvention of Loyalty this week, a whitepaper arguing that co-branded reward debit cards - not credit cards - are the missing piece in European travel loyalty. It is, unavoidably, a payments company publishing research that concludes payments companies are the answer. But there are a couple of numbers in there that stopped me mid-coffee, so let's go through it properly.

Currensea's polling found that 26% of Britons with household incomes above £150,000, who flew at least five times last year, are not members of any airline loyalty scheme. For hotel programmes the figure is 29%.

If you're reading this newsletter, that probably sounds absurd. Five flights a year and no frequent flyer number? But I think it's more believable than it first appears. Plenty of high earners fly on business, hand the booking to a travel management company, and have simply never had a reason to think about it. The points are being left on the table by the people who could most easily afford not to care.

Worth flagging the obvious caveat: this is Currensea's own polling, and the release doesn't disclose sample size or methodology. Treat the exact percentages as directional rather than gospel.

The strategic point behind it, though, is sound. Airlines and hotels have no loyalty relationship at all with a chunk of their highest-value customers, and that is a genuinely expensive gap.

This is the bit of the whitepaper I found most convincing, because it's structural rather than survey-based.

In the US, co-branded loyalty is built on credit cards - it's why an American Airlines or Delta card is a mainstream consumer product over there. In Europe, debit accounts for 77% of all consumer card spending, rising to 85% in the UK. So a model built entirely around credit is designing for the minority of transactions from day one.

That doesn't make Avios credit cards bad - I'll come back to that - but it does explain why hotel groups in particular have gone debit-first in the UK. We've now had Hilton Honors, Marriott Bonvoy and United all launch with Currensea, and at the end of June IHG launched two Revolut debit cards in partnership with Visa. Four major travel brands, one direction of travel.

The usage data Currensea shares is the strongest part of their case. The highest-spending quartile of their cardholders puts through an average of over £36,700 a year, more than half of all cardholder spending goes on lodging, dining, travel and leisure, and 17% goes directly to the partner brand. More than 75% have used the card abroad, across an average of four foreign countries. Whatever you make of the earn rates, these cards are clearly not sitting in a drawer.

Here's where the two UK approaches genuinely differ, and it's worth understanding before you apply for anything.

Currensea's cards sit on top of your existing bank account. You keep banking with whoever you bank with, and the card pulls from that account. The IHG cards are issued by Revolut, so you need a Revolut account and you need to keep it funded - a genuine bit of friction if Revolut isn't already your main bank.

Currensea's own polling makes exactly this point: just 5% of Britons use a secondary bank account for daily spending. Self-serving? Absolutely. Also, I think, correct. I've watched enough readers open a card and then never top it up to know that friction kills utilisation.

If you're Marriott-focused, the Bonvoy Currensea card is the one that works alongside your normal current account. I hold the Premium version myself and it has quietly become one of the most useful things in my wallet - you can take a look at the Marriott Bonvoy Currensea cards here.

The reason it works so well for me is that it's built for the spending I was already doing. It earns 6 points per £1 on Marriott stays abroad and 3 points per £1 on general overseas spend, against 4 and 1.5 points per £1 respectively at home. So it rewards you most precisely when you're travelling, which is exactly when I'm paying hotel bills. The 0.5% FX fee on Currensea's realtime rate makes it a sensible card to be settling those bills with in the first place.

The bit that seals it, though, is the Elite Night Credits. The Premium card carries a £175 annual fee and comes with 15 Elite Night Credits a year, plus one more for every £4,000 spent up to a further five - so 20 a year at the top end. Sitting at Bonvoy Titanium, those nights do real work towards requalifying without me sleeping in a single extra hotel room. There's automatic Gold status if you're not already above it, and a free night award on renewal once you've spent £5,000 abroad in the year, rising to a 50,000-point award above £9,500.

If you're IHG-focused, the Revolut Elite card is genuinely aggressive: IHG quotes up to 3 points per £1 on non-IHG spend internationally, up to 1.5 points per £1 in the UK and Europe, 15 Elite Night Credits, and automatic Diamond Elite after £35,000 of annual spend, for an £18 monthly fee. The enhanced earning offer for new sign-ups runs until 25 August 2026, so there are just over three weeks left on it. You can set up a Revolut account here if you don't already have one.

Buried in the middle of the whitepaper is a claim I've been chewing on since I read it. Currensea argue that as AI agents start comparing prices, points and redemption options on our behalf, loyalty programmes that rely on habit, friction or intermediary point schemes become far more exposed. Programmes offering real benefits, status and a genuine connection to the brand should hold up better.

James Lynn, Currensea's co-founder and CEO, frames it as the battle for loyalty moving from the screen to the transaction layer.

Now, he would say that - it's an argument that lands neatly on his own product. But strip out the vendor interest and I think the underlying observation is right, and it's something I think about a lot given the tools we build here. A huge amount of loyalty programme value currently comes from customers not comparing properly. If an agent does the comparing for you every single time, the programmes that survive on inertia are in trouble, and the ones with real, hard-to-replicate benefits become more valuable.

You can already see a small version of this. When you can search award availability across a dozen programmes in seconds using something like Award Travel Finder, blind loyalty to one airline gets much harder to justify.

The commercial backdrop here is worth spelling out. At its investor day in June, IAG - British Airways' parent - set out a medium-term target of more than €1 billion in operating profit for IAG Loyalty, the business behind Avios, up from €593 million in 2025.

Loyalty is no longer a marketing cost centre. It's one of the most profitable parts of the group. Which is exactly why we keep seeing devaluations, spend-based tiers and reworked earning tables: these programmes are being run as profit engines, and the margin has to come from somewhere.

More competition for your everyday spend is, on balance, good news for us. But it also means more products, more fees and more complexity to work through.

I'm not about to move my main spending to a debit card, and I'd be cautious about advising anyone else to without thinking it through.

The straightforward reason is protection. A UK credit card gives you Section 75 cover on purchases between £100 and £30,000, which makes the card issuer jointly liable with the retailer if something goes wrong. Debit cards only give you chargeback, which is a scheme rule rather than a legal right. For a £4,000 holiday, that difference is not academic.

The second reason is earn rate. My Barclaycard Avios Plus earns 1.5 Avios per £1 across the board. My Capital on Tap business cards earn Avios on business spend that would otherwise earn nothing at all. No UK reward debit card is beating that on airline currency.

Where I do think these cards make sense is as a supplement rather than a replacement - which is exactly how the Marriott one sits in my wallet. If you're chasing hotel status, a card handing you elite night credits for spending you'd be doing anyway is a very cheap route to a tier that would otherwise cost you dozens of nights. And if you're one of the people in that 26% - flying regularly, earning well, collecting nothing - almost any of these products is better than what you have now.

If you're building an earning strategy from scratch, start with the credit cards and add debit on top:

I'd be curious to hear from anyone actually using one of these day to day. Are you hitting meaningful status through card spend, or is it a slow trickle? Hit reply and let me know - I'll pull the responses together into a follow-up if there's enough interest.

You can read the full whitepaper on Currensea's site.

Jack