Bilt Revamps With "Bilt 2.0" After Wells Fargo Split

The Harm Ran Through the Rails, Not the Rewards Math

The rebuild had a business reason. The Wall Street Journal reported that Wells Fargo was losing roughly $10 million a month on the co-brand because rent transactions were subsidized and too few cardholders carried balances or spent off rent, a characterization Bilt disputed as an inaccurate representation. Bilt 2.0 reprices exactly that: three tiers at no fee, $95 and $495, a Bilt Cash structure, and full housing points conditioned on non-housing spend. The old card went inactive on February 7, 2026, and accounts moved onto a new stack with Cardless as servicer and Column N.A. as issuer.

The complaints that followed were read almost everywhere as a rewards story. The harm clustered somewhere else. Moving millions of accounts onto a new issuing and servicing stack in a single cutover is where renters reported payments that never reached landlords, were rejected or returned, or arrived late. Support was AI-fronted, and customers reported a chatbot that could not resolve a stuck rent payment and difficulty reaching a human. A points program that disappoints costs a customer value. A rent payment that does not arrive costs a late fee and a landlord relationship.

The judgment here is that the operational cost of repricing the loyalty model landed on the one payment the product exists to serve, which is what drew two arms of government to the same facts. The CFPB met with Bilt, directed full redress and framed the outcome as collaboration rather than a protracted investigation, with roughly 500 newly identified customers slated for fee reimbursement by early June. Senate Banking ranking member Elizabeth Warren pressed a different question: whether immediately debiting rent, rather than processing it as a credit purchase, complies with the Credit CARD Act of 2009. One posture closes the file, the other opens a compliance question. The compliance question is the one that outlives the redress.