Mesa shuts down bank card that rewarded cardholders for paying their mortgages

Fintech startup Mesa has shut down its Householders Card, which awarded factors to cardholders for paying their mortgages.

A message on the Mesa web site states that as of December 12, “all Mesa Householders Card accounts are closed,” including, “All bank cards have been deactivated and you might be not capable of make any new purchases or earn Mesa Factors.”

A Mesa FAQ in regards to the shutdown described this as “a enterprise determination to shut the Mesa Householders Card Program solely.” TechCrunch has reached out to Mesa for extra touch upon its future plans.

The startup launched simply over a yr in the past, in November 2024, with $9.2 million in funding ($7.2 million in fairness funding and $2 million in debt). It provided two merchandise — mortgage loans with 1% money again, in addition to the bank card with rewards together with money again, journey, and offset mortgage funds.

On the time, CEO Kelley Halpin informed TechCrunch that the startup had “taken what everyone loves about journey and eating playing cards to re-contextualize that for the home-owner/mother or father.”

In idea, you would earn factors for dwelling bills by utilizing any bank card with rewards, however Mesa mentioned it structured its factors program to incentivize spending associated to dwelling possession.

“So it’s not rewarding you on journey and eating spend; it’s rewarding you on gasoline, groceries, your HOA, utilities, dwelling items in addition to your mortgage fee,” Halpin mentioned.

Bilt, which has a rewards card that enables prospects to earn factors on hire funds, says it should increase with factors for mortgage funds when it launches a revamped card subsequent yr.

Mesa’s card shutdown has been coated by journey offers web sites like One Mile at a Time and Upgraded Factors, which say that Mesa cardmembers have been complaining about declined transactions for the previous week, with the corporate initially claiming this was solely a short lived outage.

Now, it appears the one remaining solution to redeem factors earned on the Mesa card is thru a press release credit score at a charge of 0.6%.