Rebuilding a stagnant card into a modern value proposition

Section documenting Spencer Allen's tenure as Director, Credit Card Product Commercialization at Fidelity Investments, June 2020 to June 2025. The card RFP was scoped as a retention mandate - keep the existing card base engaged while underwriting and funding were renegotiated - which opened the door to both the benefits refresh and the loyalty-event redesign below. Underwriting and data: as the marketing stakeholder for the card's ad hoc reporting (outside the digital product), Spencer worked with US Bank to build a custom Tableau dashboard for faster, customized reporting, which surfaced the data behind a recurring complaint that the card's wealthiest customers were underserved on credit lines - many had limited or no debt, making FICO alone an unreliable signal of their creditworthiness. He built the business case for changing the underwriting approach, worked with US Bank's risk team to identify data elements that correlated to creditworthiness beyond FICO, and worked across legal, data privacy, and Acxiom to update Fidelity's privacy policy to permit sharing those three data elements. The result: the standard credit line ceiling rose from $25,000 to $35,000 for qualifying cardholders, a 40% increase in total credit extended and a 9% improvement in approval rates. Value proposition refresh: conducted in partnership with card issuer US Bank, customer research identified travel, safety, and frugality as the base's core passion points, which shaped a benefits package including up to $100 in Reward Points toward Global Entry or TSA PreCheck; an Auto Rental Collision Damage Waiver covering up to $75,000, comparable to premium fee-based cards like the Chase Sapphire family, which lifted spend by 30% year over year in auto rental merchant-category-code transactions in the 90 days following the announcement; access to the Visa Dining Collection through OpenTable, unlocking hard-to-get reservations at restaurants across 30+ cities in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, a perk typically reserved for annual-fee Visa Infinite cards; removal of foreign transaction fees; and elimination of legacy minimums, caps, and expiration dates. Loyalty strategy ("surprise & delight"): Fidelity's prior card loyalty event model was a countrywide, multi-city movie theater program reaching thousands of attendees across 4-6 cities but with no way to attribute attendance to individual customer engagement. During COVID-19, Spencer redesigned this into a bespoke, high-touch event model of 200 hand-picked households per city. Targeting ran on two tracks: Fidelity Rewards+, which gave cardholders accelerated card earn of up to 3% based on an assets-under-management tier but had no experiential component until Spencer, drawing on his hospitality background, pitched a test event branded and explicitly tied to Fidelity Rewards+ and the card, which became a standing practice; and Fidelity's advisory organization, with whom Spencer layered zip codes over cardholder data to map customers against the delivery radius of the celebrity chefs running each event, cross-checked against existing events and marketing activity to avoid oversaturating a market like Boston, and used the same approach to plan the annual metro-market calendar. This redesigned, fully measurable program improved customer service metrics, generated over $10 million in new investment funds, and simultaneously advanced card engagement, Rewards+ participation, and advisor-relationship goals. Spencer led the card team's RFP response and contract execution with external consultants and internal strategy teams, including SLA design, new funding source identification, and data-sharing platform negotiation. He was nominated for Fidelity's "Excellence in Action" award in Q1 and Q2 2025, was converted from consultant to full-time employee in July 2021, and the refreshed card was later named Kiplinger's Overall Winner for Best Cash Back Credit Card for eight consecutive years plus a 2025 Kiplinger Readers' Choice Award.