Birch is personal finance app that helps people manage and optimize your credit cards. It supports 180+ reward credit cards, everything from the category and merchant bonuses to how they redeem and what the points/miles worth. For people with multiple credit cards, it shows them when they're not using their cards optimally and even in real time with geo-location.
Hi guys, founder of Birch here! We launched on mobile a few months back and wanted to share our app with the PH community. Let me know if you have any questions!
@jessica_coane Good questions - for new card recommendations we take your historical spend and analyze it against the categories, merchant bonuses and other weird quirks (like Amex Everyday 20x purchases bonuses) on all the cards we support. We build in things like rotating caps, annual fees, spending limits, etc and figure out the raw rewards you would have earned on a card. Based on your set preferences for hotels/flights/car rentals, etc, we determine a reward value for those raw points/miles and calculate your earning potential. Other factors like student or military cards & credit score also play a role in what cards you're offered.
There's a big, underlying data component of the business that allows us to stay relevant and updated on reward valuations and build those into the mix.
Could you elaborate what you mean by "supplying outlets for earnings?" Are you referring to redemption of rewards once someone has accrued?
@jessica_coane It's one of our longer terms goals - to provide a full end to end earning/redemption platform for consumers!
We actually have a working version (internally) of what we call goals, which allows a user to set a travel goal in the future, and based on credit card spend + rewards earned + current reward balance + us knowing all the different reward options, we can help them plan, track and reach that goal.
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