Glossary
Credit card rewards glossary
The vocabulary of credit-card reward routing, defined in plain English. Each term links to a full explanation of how it affects which card you should swipe.
Routing
- Reward Routing
- Reward routing is the practice of automatically selecting, at the moment of purchase, the credit card in your wallet that earns the most value on that specific merchant and category.
- Minimum Spend Requirement (MSR)
- A minimum spend requirement is the amount you must charge to a new card within a set window to earn its sign-up bonus — e.g. $4,000 in the first three months.
Rewards
- Unified Valuation Model (UVM)
- The Unified Valuation Model converts every card's points, miles, and cash back into a single cash-equivalent dollar figure so different reward currencies can be compared on one scale.
- Category Multiplier
- A category multiplier is the rate at which a card earns rewards in a given spending category — e.g. 4× points on dining or 6% back at U.S. supermarkets.
- Cash-Equivalent Value
- Cash-equivalent value is the dollar amount a points or miles balance is worth at a chosen redemption rate, used to compare reward currencies against plain cash back.
- Catch-All Rate
- A catch-all rate is the flat reward rate a card earns on purchases that do not qualify for any category bonus — for example 2% back or 1.5× points on everything else.
Payments
- Just-In-Time (JIT) Funding
- Just-In-Time funding is a card-network flow where the issuer is asked, in real time during authorization, to fund a transaction — letting a router decide which underlying card pays before the charge clears.
- Merchant Category Code (MCC)
- A Merchant Category Code is a four-digit number assigned by card networks that classifies what a merchant sells — e.g. 5812 for restaurants or 5411 for grocery stores.
- Authorization
- Authorization is the real-time approval step when a card is swiped, where the network confirms funds and the issuer approves or declines before the transaction later settles.
- Interchange
- Interchange is the fee a merchant's bank pays the card-issuing bank on each transaction; it is the primary funding source for most credit-card rewards.
Product
- Card Velocity
- Card velocity is the pace at which you open new credit cards over a rolling window, which issuers use to approve or deny applications (for example, Chase's 5/24 rule).