Glossary · Routing
Reward Routing
Reward routing is the practice of automatically selecting, at the moment of purchase, the credit card in your wallet that earns the most value on that specific merchant and category.
Carrying several rewards cards only helps if you swipe the right one every time. In practice people default to one card and quietly leave 3×–6× category bonuses on the table.
A reward router removes that decision. It compares your cards against the merchant, any live offers, and category multipliers, then routes the charge to the highest-earning card — or tells you which card to swipe.
Pikt routes using a layered priority: merchant whitelist overrides, then live merchant offers, then minimum-spend-requirement gating, then category multipliers, with a flat catch-all card as the fallback.
Related terms
- Just-In-Time (JIT) Funding — Just-In-Time funding is a card-network flow where the issuer is asked, in real time during authorization, to fund a transaction — letting a router decide which underlying card pays before the charge clears.
- Unified Valuation Model (UVM) — The Unified Valuation Model converts every card's points, miles, and cash back into a single cash-equivalent dollar figure so different reward currencies can be compared on one scale.
- Category Multiplier — A category multiplier is the rate at which a card earns rewards in a given spending category — e.g. 4× points on dining or 6% back at U.S. supermarkets.