Methodology
How Pikt decides which card to swipe
Pikt routes every purchase through a single question: which card in your wallet earns the most cash-equivalent value on this exact merchant and category? Answering it requires two pieces — a way to compare different reward currencies (the Unified Valuation Model) and a deterministic priority order for the routing decision.
1. The Unified Valuation Model (UVM)
Points, miles, and cash back are different units and cannot be compared directly. The UVM normalizes them by assigning each reward currency a cents-per-unit valuation, then expressing all earnings in cash-equivalent dollars:
earned value = spend × multiplier × cents-per-unit ÷ 100
| Reward currency | Cash-equivalent value |
|---|---|
| Chase Ultimate Rewards | 1.25¢ per point |
| Bilt Points | 1.25¢ per point |
| Amex Membership Rewards | 1.0¢ per point |
| Capital One Venture Miles | 1.0¢ per point |
| Cash back | 1.0¢ per point |
Valuations track industry-average redemption rates and are applied consistently across the wallet so a 4× points purchase and a 3% cash-back purchase can be ranked head to head. See the UVM glossary entry.
2. The routing priority
During a Just-In-Time funding request — the real-time window while a charge authorizes — Pikt evaluates these rules in order and stops at the first that applies:
1. Merchant whitelist override
If you have pinned a merchant to a specific card, that instruction wins absolutely — even over utilization alerts. A whitelist is an explicit user decision to anchor all spend at a vendor to one card.
2. Live merchant & category offers
An active targeted offer reflects real incremental value, so it outranks sign-up-bonus gating. The router compares the best merchant offer and the best category offer and takes the higher cash-equivalent.
3. Minimum-spend-requirement (MSR) gating
When a card has an open, unmet sign-up-bonus spend requirement, eligible spend is steered to that card — because the bonus is usually worth far more than ongoing category earn.
4. Category multipliers
With no offer or open MSR in play, the router ranks cards by their multiplier for the purchase's merchant category code (MCC), converted to cash-equivalent dollars.
5. Catch-all fallback
If nothing else applies, the charge lands on your strongest flat-rate card so non-bonused spend never earns the bare minimum.
3. Why it is deterministic
The same wallet, merchant, and amount always produce the same routing decision and the same dollar estimate. There is no opaque model — the choice is the top of a fixed priority list, evaluated against published point valuations.
That is what lets Pikt show a plain-English reason for every swipe (“Amex Gold, 4× on dining ≈ $7.20”) instead of an unexplained recommendation. Worked examples live in our case-study library.
Pikt is a personal-project preview. Point valuations are estimates, not guaranteed redemption rates, and reward programs change frequently.