Image Credit: Mox.com
For someone obsessed with finding the best value with banks and credit cards, I quickly realised the best companies to leverage on are the virtual banks due to their nascent incorporations and the need to quickly acquire customers to establish some form of market presence as well as to hopefully reach some scale to run a bank sustainably. Thus, it’s important to me that I sign up for as many of these banks will they’re still doling out attractive goodies like big sign-up bonuses, high interest rates for my deposits, as well as good returns on my credit card spend.
Truth be told, the huge bonuses and benefits do seem to be dwindling since I stepped foot in Hong Kong several years ago, perhaps due to the market maturing and other external factors at play. That being said, I still think they provide great value to those who want to have a more seamless digital banking experience and enjoy benefits along the way.
About Mox
The first bank I would like to mention is Mox, a company that is jointly owned by heavyweights such as Standard Chartered Bank, HKT, PCCW, and Trip.com. They’re juggernauts in their respective fields (banking, telecommunications, ICT, and travel). Crucially, as they’re a licensed bank, a maximum of HK$500k of your deposits are covered by the Deposit Protection Scheme.
Image credit: Deposit Protection Board
They’ve only been around since 2020, so they’re still very much aggressively acquiring customers, which is great for us!
Why Mox?
I like Mox for 3 main reasons:
- Very smooth user interface and intuitive onboarding experience. All you need is your HKID with you and you’re all set;
- It comes with a credit card that also has cashback benefits (many other virtual banks either purely function as a savings accounts, or have debit cards with no spend benefits); and
- Nifty features and active promotions that enable me to spend, save, or invest my money which maximises its utility.
1. Onboarding experience
It took me about 10 minutes from starting the application process to opening my bank account. Talk about lightning quick! Granted that you’ll get a similar experience with many of the other virtual banks, but Mox’s app design and flow just makes the whole process straightforward and almost pleasant. Once approved, you get a virtual card that you can use immediately for any online payments. The physical debit/credit card took about a week or so to arrive in my mailbox.
I then proceeded to apply for the Mox Credit account which is required to obtain the credit function for the card. The process was slightly longer due to requiring more information, but was still butter smooth, and it only took about a week to get my account approved.
2. Great starter credit card
For clarity, the card will initially be set up as a debit card that draws funds from your savings account when making payments. While somewhat useful, it only earns 0.5% cashback and you need to fund transactions immediately, thus it’s highly recommended to immediately apply for the Mox Credit so you can ‘Flip’ it into a credit card and start earning at least 1% cashback or more!
The Mox credit card has three cashback tiers depending on several factors. The base cashback is a respectable unlimited 1% cashback. With the plethora of credit cards available in Hong Kong, 1% is somewhat disappointing at first glance, but it’s a great card that you can use if you’re not trying to actively maximise value from your spends, and also unlimited cashback makes it useful if you’re planning for large or frequent transactions as many credit cards with higher cashback/miles earning propositions have limiting caps to the cashback amounts you can earn every month.
They’ve launched a recent promotion that allows you to earn an unlimited 2% cashback if you deposit at least HK$75,000 in your savings account. It’s not a bad deal, but do be mindful that the money has to be in the savings account, any money transferred into a Time Deposit account will not be counted as part of the HK$75,000 requirement, thus you will need to consider the opportunity cost of earning the base interest rate for savings account of 0.3% (terrible, but not uncommon across most banks) versus putting it in a Time Deposit which could earn up to 4% p.a. with Mox or other banks at the time of writing.
Lastly, they have a 3% cashback tier for certain merchants, which covers a good range of regular spending you may come across, such as telecommunications, convenience stores, food delivery (Deliveroo), travel websites (e.g. Trip.com) and others. A caveat is that the 3% cashback has an annual cap (for 2024 at least) of HK$1,800. This equates to HK$60,000 in annual spend, or about HK$5,000 per month. I wouldn’t worry about the cap too much, unless you’re a big spender at some of these stores. And in general, there are better cards to use for online payments, which I’ll touch on in another post.
Mox also has unlimited 3% cashback on many supermarkets, which I really appreciate as this is where I personally find the most value from. They cover pretty much all the big players (Wellcome, PARKnSHOP, Market Place etc.). Of course there are other cards out there that provide ad-hoc benefits such as discounts to your bill when purchasing on a specific day (e.g. Hang Seng’s enJoy card), but it’s quite unbeatable as your starter credit card in Hong Kong!
3. Active and fun promotions (which may or not be that useful)
From my personal experience, Mox seems to be one of the more active virtual banks enticing their members with various types of promotions, such as a significantly higher interest rate (up to 7% p.a.) if you deposit new funds, or earning Asia miles in lieu of interest. Personally, I was very happy to take advantage of their 8% (!) cashback for foreign spend a few months back.
Other Features
Mox has a whole library of other features, such as Time Deposits and Instant Loans amongst them. I don’t really use them as in general their Time Deposit interest rates are not as attractive as other banks, and I don’t usually subscribe for additional loans due to the fees involved and the indirect impact on my credit score.
They also allow exchanging of currencies from HKD to 9 other currencies, ranging from USD, GBP, JPY, SGD, CNY and others. You’re limited in being able to use them though as Mox does not allow transferring, withdrawing or spending them so best to leave this feature alone.
Nifty Cash-Stretching Trick
One of my favourite uses of Mox is to further stretch my spending, as I can use Mox Credit to pay off bills, which somewhat amazingly includes credit card statements. This means, for any given transaction, I am able to stretch repayment up to 60 days! There are various benefits to this, from having a cash float for longer, as well as earning additional interest on that float. Assuming a hypothetical credit card bill of HK$30,000, stretching repayment for 60 days and putting that amount in a Time Deposit at 4% p.a. could yield you about HK$200. Not significant, but not a small sum either. In a future post I’ll share how I use this “trick” to stretch my rental payments by almost 2 months and earn credit card points and cashback along the way!
To further add to the absurdity, Mox also has a “Split Payment” feature that allows you to split any bill payments and pay it over a longer period, thus stretching the overall repayment even further down the road. However, this does incur fees, which severely diminishes any financial gain from stretching repayment, though I can see it being useful if you’re in a pickle and need to delay repayment.
Summary
Mox is a great starter virtual bank for anyone who is just setting foot in Hong Kong, or taking up a job/tertiary education. As a recap:
- Super quick and easy account opening process
- Great starter credit card for everyday needs
- Nifty features to maximise your spend and stretch your money
You may download the Mox app by scanning this QR code below which will bring you to your phone’s app store:
Use my referral code “BTRXNN” when going through the application process which gives you HK$1,000 when you spend HK$1,000 with Mox Credit (100% cashback!).
Disclaimer: I will also get a referral fee for every successful referral, thank you in advance for your support!
Feel free to let me know what you guys think about Mox below, and do share if you have found other nifty money-saving tricks with their myriad features!
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