the rakuten amex card is such an interesting little oddity. the card network is american express, but the issuing bank is first electronic bank, and imprint payments (whose website looks similar to deserve's, which has been sold to intuit, and is now defunct) is the card program manager. it's a no-fee card that earns rakuten cash back, which can be converted to mr points. i don't really care about the dining and grocery cashback, but +4% to any rakuten purchase is worth the hard credit pull. plus, there's a 20,000 amex point bonus for $2k spend in 3 months. time to extract maximum value from this card before they close it lmao