The Benchmark Weekly

One email a week about Canadian cards and bank accounts: what launched, what got better, what got worse, and which offers are about to close. The good welcome offers run for about six weeks and nobody announces the end of one.

What You Get

• Elevated welcome offers while they are still open, with the end date, because the good ones run for six weeks and are gone.
• New cards and accounts as they are added, and the ones that were quietly withdrawn.
• Any fee, interest rate or earn rate that moved, with the old figure and the new one.
• One email a week. A week where nothing worth sending happened does not get an email about nothing.
• Nothing in it is there because somebody paid for it. Some links may earn us a referral fee and none of them buy a place in the email, an order, or a word of the write up.
• Your address is used to send you this and nothing else. It is not sold, rented, traded or handed to an issuer.

How It Makes Money

Plainly, because a newsletter that earns its keep and does not say so is the thing this site was built against. Some links in the email may earn us a referral fee when somebody applies through them, the same way links on the site do.

What that fee does not buy is anything you would want to know about. It does not buy a place in the email, the order things appear in, a rating, or a sentence of the write up. A card that pays us nothing goes in ahead of one that does whenever it is the better card, and a card that pays well gets written up as badly as it deserves. That is the same rule the comparison runs on and it is stated in full on how the site makes money.

Nothing in the email is sponsored, no issuer sees it before you do, and no issuer can pay to be in it at any price.

What Happens to Your Address

We record the address, the date, the page you signed up on and the exact wording you agreed to, so that if you ever ask what you consented to we can show you rather than describe it. We do not record your IP address, because a confirmed click on a link only you received proves the same thing without collecting anything extra.

You are not on the list until you click the link in the confirmation email. That is deliberate: it means nobody can sign up an address they do not own, including us. An unconfirmed request is deleted after sixty days.

Your address is never sold, rented, traded or given to a bank or an issuer, and it is not used to send you anything except this. The full detail is in the privacy policy.