Bilt Rewards relaunched its card without Wells Fargo — and without the bank that made it possible

Bilt Rewards, the loyalty and payments platform best known for letting renters earn points on rent payments without a transaction fee, ended its original card partnership with Wells Fargo on February 6, 2026 — a split reporting has attributed to the arrangement no longer being economically viable for the bank. That partnership had been central to Bilt’s pitch since its 2021 launch: rent is typically not a category that generates card-network interchange revenue for the issuing bank the way retail spending does, making a bank willing to underwrite that economics a load-bearing piece of the business model.

In the aftermath, Bilt introduced what it calls Bilt Card 2.0, a three-tier lineup — Blue, Obsidian and Palladium — issued by Column N.A. Bank and operated through the Cardless card-management platform rather than through a traditional big-bank issuing relationship. Rebuilding an entire card program around a new issuer and a different technical infrastructure provider in the space of roughly a year is a significant operational undertaking, and the shift signals Bilt leaning on newer, more flexible card-issuing infrastructure rather than another legacy bank partnership.

The transition was not clean: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau investigated the switch earlier in 2026 following customer complaints, and Bilt has since put in place redress measures for affected members. The nature of those complaints and the specifics of the redress have not been independently detailed in full by this publication, but the CFPB’s involvement underscores that migrating a large existing cardholder base to a new issuer carries real execution risk — lost points, card reissuance friction, or benefit gaps are common failure points in bank-partnership transitions, and regulators pay attention when complaints spike around them.

Despite the disruption, Bilt currently carries a $10.75 billion valuation, indicating investors are still backing the underlying thesis: that rent, historically dead weight for rewards programs, is a large enough spending category to build a standalone loyalty and card business around, if the issuing and economics problems can be solved. Whether Bilt Card 2.0 proves as durable as the original Wells Fargo-issued product will depend on how the Column/Cardless infrastructure performs at scale and whether the CFPB inquiry surfaces further issues beyond what has already been addressed.