Mesa offered a unique opportunity to earn points primarily for paying off your home mortgage, but now the program is no more.

What was Mesa?

Mesa entered the transferable points game when it launched its credit card (the Mesa Homeowners Card) in late 2024. While Bilt was structured around those paying rent, one question people had at the time was if paying a mortgage would earn points. While Bilt had no immediate answer, Mesa arrived and tried to fill in that gap.

Mesa offered points to customers that could be redeemed as credits at a rate of 0.6 cents/point or towards gift cards at 0.8 cents/point. Alternatively, and where this was more lucrative for us in the points game, you could transfer to the following programs:

• Accor Live Limitless (3:2 ratio)
• Air Canada Aeroplan (1:1 ratio)
• Air India Maharaja Club (1:1 ratio)
• Finnair Plus (1:1 ratio)
• Hainan Airlines Fortune Wings Club (1:1 ratio)
• SAS EuroBonus (1:1 ratio)
• Thai Airways Royal Orchid Plus (1:1 ratio)
• Vietnam Airlines LotusMiles (1:1 ratio)

While the list of transfer partners wasn’t award-winning. it was the only program with transfers to SAS EuroBonus.

Mesa’s sudden shut down

Per Doctor of Credit, the card will be immediately shut down as of December 2025:

We are reaching out today to share the unfortunate news that, effective immediately, your Mesa Homeowners Card account will be closed. As such, your credit card will be deactivated and you will not be able to make any new purchases or earn Mesa Points. We will provide you with separate guidance with regards to your remaining Mesa Points balance. This account closure has nothing to do with your account standing and is not the result of any wrongdoing or any actions taken by you with regards to your account.

Those with existing points balances are out of luck–points cannot be transferred to other programs without a backdoor hack (uninstalling/reinstalling the app, going on airplane mode to updates). We don’t expect those transfers to actually stick. After all, those who used points for flights are seeing their flights canceled. The only use for points might be to offset charges on that final statement.

What a headache for those involved.

Should this cause alarm for other bank programs?

The short answer is no. Mesa’s problems are of its own doing, but it should cause some pause for hoarding points excessively.

The earn structure on its card made no long-term sense

Mesa’s fee structure didn’t seem sustainable. First of all, there was no annual fee on their credit card. It also earned the following points structure:

• 1x points for each dollar spent on mortgages linked through the app, up to 100,000 points/year
• 2x points for groceries, gas, and EV charging
• 3x points for home decor, home improvement stores, general contractors, streaming, home insurance, property taxes, telecommunications, maintenance, daycare services, and utilities
• 1x points elsewhere

Oddly enough, for points earned on mortgages, there was no requirement to use that credit card on those charges. Instead, you simply had to tell the app you had a mortgage to pay off. After that, just spend $1,000/month in any charges and you’ll unlock the extra points for paying your mortgage.

In that sense, if you maxed this out, you could spend $1,000 monthly at home improvement stores to get 3,000 points (they sell gift cards to other vendors and restaurants) and then rake in another 8,333 points monthly for your mortgage (since the cap is 100,000 points annually). How is it sustainable that cardholders could get up to 11,333 transferable points on just $1,000 of spend?

On top of that, there were a number of statement credits you could earn, ranging from a free membership to Costco to $30 quarterly credits at Lowe’s.

The brutal math is, well. brutal

Some startups see an opportunity in a niche, find some venture capital to fund its early growth, and then lead to substantial growth–or so they hope. Not all startups make it, and those that have a better business model might have higher chances of survival.

In this particular case, it’s hard to see where the upside would be for its venture capital partners. If we assume a 2% interchange fee, a $1,000 purchase only gives $20 in fees. Of that fee, some of it is retained by Visa for using its network and a portion goes back to Mesa. But for simplicity, let’s still assume that Mesa gets 2%. How would $20 fund the points you’d get not only from the purchase but also from mortgages? What if you assume spend in 1x categories and a $3,000 mortgage? If you’re talking statement credits at 0.6 cents each, that’s $24 going back to the consumer.

To be clear, this is what Mesa says is the minimum requirement from cardholders to earn full rewards. Already it’s in the red and that’s before you start considering the transferable points aspect.

While banks might anticipate having cardholders running a balance and earning interest off that balance, the card is meant to appeal to those in the points world. There haven’t been credible studies done about the likelihood of running a balance based on the cohort who uses transferable currencies, but these customers aren’t as likely to run a balance. The larger the unpaid balance, the more the cardholder has to pay for those points in interest. Chase found that out years ago when it first introduced the Chase Sapphire Reserve.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Mesa folded just a year after it started.

We can still learn a lesson from this

Certainly, if something seems too good to be true, you’re right to tread cautiously. Hoarding points for that big trip isn’t the best idea. While we’ve said transferable points currencies are a better hedge than points in individual programs, there’s a little more nuance to it than that.

You don’t want to store points in individual programs because:

• Risk of devaluation–and then your hard-earned points become worth less (though often not worthless).
• Points expiry–some programs have hard expiration rules that cannot be easily extended.
• Temporary transfer bonuses from banks to individual programs, though we’d argue it might not be the optimal play in all scenarios

On the flip side, leaving those points in the transferable bank program is supposed to help alleviate those risks. Of course, it only helps if that bank program actually stays in business.

Like award programs, some bank programs are riskier than others. There were large question marks some had when this card was first introduced on how it would survive, and clearly it didn’t have a pathway to profitability. Some were also worried about Bilt’s sustainability, but it sourced more capital earlier in 2025. That should alleviate concerns in both the short- and medium-term.

If you ever have doubts about the sustainability of a bank program, your best bet would be to transfer to a program you trust and one that has easy extension of points validity. Of the options Mesa had, that would be either Air Canada Aeroplan or Finnair Plus (whose points can transfer to other Avios programs).

Were you caught up in the surprise closure of Mesa?

Suggested reading:

• Rakuten is a Great Points Generator (Now Including Bilt)
• How to Get Started with Points
• Stop Thinking of Points as Free