After several decades together, USAA just took it’s $26B/year in debit transactions and left MasterCard for Visa. They announced the break-up last fall, but the roll-out is happening now, as evidenced by an email I received yesterday:

This is good news for me because my oldest credit card will now have no foreign transaction fees. Though I don’t use this card for everyday spend due to the low 1% cash back it earns, it’s still nice to get rid of the FT fee in case I do ever want to use it abroad.

Here are some of the changes for customers:

With the switch USAA is offering a 10% bonus on all cash back earned through the end of the year, though that’s not enough to make me switch my spend back to this card. If I spent $10K on the card through the end of the year, that would be only $100 cash back, then a $10 bonus.

I would do much better using my Chase Sapphire Preferred to earn a much more valuable 10-15K Ultimate Rewards points (depending on how much of the spend was on 2x-points-earning travel and dining). Here’s a great post from Million Mile Secrets on how to best redeem UR points.

Considering USAA was MasterCard’s top issuer of debit cards, this is a huge loss.

MasterCard’s response in the WSJ: “While we don’t like losing anything, this is part of our business and we factor this into how we work.”

Let me guess, the break-up was mutual?

Reminds me of the lyric to a song by one of my favorite artists, Blood Orange:

I never was in love
You know that you were never good enough