19 Nov 2025

A fourth tier of credit cards has begun to emerge

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By Ted Rossman, Bankrate.com

For a long time, credit cards have generally fallen into three tiers: no-annual-fee cards, mid-tier cards with annual fees around $95 and premium cards with annual fees measured in the hundreds (these used to cluster around $400 or $500 per year, now it’s more like $800 or $900 in many cases).

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The upmarket migration of luxury credit cards such as the Chase Sapphire Reserve® and American Express Platinum Card® has created a large (and growing) gap between the traditional middle and premium tiers. And we all know that businesses see gaps and like to fill them with profit.

In this case, they’ve begun to do that by introducing a fourth tier of cards — upper-middle-class cards, if you will — and I expect more cards at that level are on the way. This is good news for the many households left behind by the soaring annual fees of premium cards, but underwhelmed by the traditional mid-tier offerings.

There’s a lot of potential value in this emerging market segment, as well as opportunities for card issuers to be even more creative when it comes to what this group is interested in. For example, where’s the credit card with elevated rewards or statement credits for daycares and summer camps or airport lounge access for the whole family?

So let’s take a look at the current landscape and make some predictions about what might be coming.

Luxury cards have become much pricier

If you want the most comprehensive airport lounge access and the longest list of travel and lifestyle credits, you’re better off with a really high-end card such as the Amex Platinum or Chase Sapphire Reserve. But you’re going to pay a handsome price for those privileges: These cards have raised their annual fees by hundreds of dollars in recent years, to $895 and $795, respectively. You’re not getting champagne travel on a beer budget anymore. Recent fee increases have promoted an even greater air of exclusivity — champagne travel on a caviar budget, if you will.

I don’t see that trend reversing anytime soon. We haven’t reached the top of the annual fee mountain yet. Within the next few years, one or both of these cards will likely eclipse the $1,000 annual fee threshold — and there will be plenty of people willing to pay it. The high-end consumer is doing quite well. Moody’s, for instance, reports that the top 10% of earners now account for 50% of all spending (a record high). Card issuers are tripping over each other in an effort to woo these heavy spenders.

But there’s inevitably going to be some attrition, too, and I see that as a feature of the strategy, not a bug.

If everyone is special, then no one is

As airport lounge access has become an increasingly widespread credit card perk, some cardholders complain that airport lounges have become too crowded. Certain issuers have trimmed back guest privileges as a potential antidote (the Capital One Venture X Rewards Credit Card, for instance, is cutting free guest benefits for most cardholders in early 2026).

Another lever that card issuers are pulling is to set higher barriers to entry, such as the higher annual fees announced over the summer on the Amex Platinum and Chase Sapphire Reserve. And if some cardholders downgrade or cancel their cards as a result, that shouldn’t surprise the issuers. They might even welcome it to some extent, if their remaining premium cardholders feel extra special and others switch to one of the company’s other products. Introducing more “premium lite” cards could help keep them in the fold.

All of this points to the necessity of an expanded grouping of credit cards targeted at the mass affluent. After all, HENRYs (high earners not rich yet) need credit cards, too. Credit card marketers will be smart to lean further in this direction, because this is an already lucrative segment of the population which should become even more so in the future as careers grow and incomes expand.

What ‘fourth-tier’ cards already exist?

There are potentially exciting cards coming as issuers work to tap into this in-between market, but waiting for banks to introduce new “premium lite” cards isn’t going to meet your needs today. The good news is that there are a few existing products that fall squarely in that upper-middle tier when it comes to their annual fees and, to some extent, their benefits.

American Express Gold Card

The best (and most longstanding) example of a “mid-tier plus” credit card is the American Express® Gold Card. With a $325 annual fee, it’s hardly cheap, but it’s a lot more affordable than the $895 you need to shell out every year for the Platinum Card. The Gold Card’s list of perks isn’t nearly as extensive (airport lounge access is a notable omission), but it gives a generous 4X points on a hefty amount of restaurant and U.S. supermarket purchases (up to $50,000 and $25,000 in annual purchases, respectively, then 1X points after that). That appeals to big spenders of all kinds, whether you’re a growing family or a household made up of a couple of DINKs (dual-income, no kids).

Gold cardholders also earn elevated rewards on many flight and hotel purchases, along with hundreds of dollars in annual credits for a wide variety of travel, dining and rideshare expenses. This is a solid option, particularly for high-spending foodies who like to travel but can’t justify the Platinum Card’s lofty price tag.

Capital One Venture X

The Capital One Venture X Rewards Credit Card debuted in 2021 to challenge the Sapphire Reserve and Amex Platinum at the top of the market, but its $395 annual fee is now less than half of what those other cards charge. It beats the Gold Card on airport lounge access, although it doesn’t have as many everyday perks. The Venture X is a hybrid example that falls in between the traditional middle tier and luxury rivals that recently became much more expensive. Capital One has an opportunity to position this card as more of a mass-market play.

Citi/AAdvantage Globe Card

Last month, Citi and American Airlines launched another card into the growing mix of offerings that sit between the traditional middle and high tiers. The Citi® / AAdvantage® Globe Mastercard®, which has a $350 annual fee, gives cardholders a taste of luxury at a more affordable price point than many rivals. Among other benefits, customers get four airport lounge passes each year, up to $240 in annual Turo credits and a few hundred dollars in additional credits ranging from in-flight purchases to personal training, live entertainment, expedited security screening and more.

Bilt Mastercard

In some cases, issuers already have products that they’re working to adapt for this upwardly mobile, not-premium-yet set.

Bilt, for instance, is doing some fascinating things that appeal to young professionals. They may be HENRYs today, but they could be truly rich soon. On the face of it, the Bilt Mastercard® is the card for renters. It’s the only credit card that allows everyone to pay rent (and earn rewards) without a transaction fee. But it’s also much more than that.

Bilt offers many compelling rewards opportunities ranging from rent payments to travel, dining and more. Plus, it features a really generous list of transfer partners and a host of other incentives that emphasize spending in your local neighborhood. Bilt has created its own loyalty ecosystem and has teased two new cards coming in 2026 that will build upon its no-annual-fee roots. The forthcoming $495 annual fee version (details to be announced) feels like it will fit the upper-middle-class credit card narrative. There will also be a $95 annual fee version with a shorter set of benefits and a lower barrier to entry.

Interestingly, Bilt is expanding upon its renter roots with a path to homeownership program that includes credit building and mortgage rewards. The company keeps working to appeal to the upwardly mobile in very unique ways.

The bottom line

Between fast-growing fintech startups like Bilt and established players such as American Express, Citi and Capital One, credit card issuers have begun carving out a new niche in the traditional credit card landscape. It’s not just “no fee, $95 fee or $795 fee” anymore. There’s a growing group of “upper-middle-class” credit cards with annual fees in the $300 to $500 range. I expect this category to continue to expand as luxury cards move further upmarket and leave a gap in their wake.

©2025 Bankrate.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

19 Nov 2025

New Report Highlights the ‘Fatal Flaws’ Behind Wrongful Capital Convictions

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Sitting in a Brazoria County courtroom in 1994, Anthony Graves, a Black man, looked at his nearly all-white jury. He was on trial for a murder he didn’t commit, and the state was seeking the death penalty. At that moment, he felt like nothing had changed in 150 years. 

“I felt like Dred Scott,” he told the Texas Observer this week. “I felt like a person sitting in front of white people with no rights, knowing that I hadn’t done anything to anybody, but I could not control what they were trying to do to me.”

As in Scott’s case, the courts ruled against Graves. He was sent to Texas’ death row. Robert Carter, the co-defendant who had named Graves as an accomplice, repeatedly told authorities he had lied. Carter even used his last words from the gurney in Huntsville in 2000 to try to clear Graves’ name. But he wasted his breath—the state’s highest appeals court was determined to keep Graves on death row. 

Graves was ultimately exonerated in 2010 after a federal court determined the prosecutors in the case had withheld critical evidence from the defense, including the fact that the star witness against Graves had repeatedly changed his story. In 2015, that prosecutor was disbarred. 

As a new ACLU report shows, Graves’ experience is all too common. 

Since 1973, when the modern era of capital punishment began, at least 201 people on death row have been exonerated—meaning cleared of any responsibility for a crime—according to data maintained by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPI). Eighteen of those people were in Texas. The ACLU report, released Wednesday, analyzed these cases looking for common threads. What it found was unsurprising but indicative of the habitual mistakes and misconduct that lead to wrongful convictions.

“In America, this risk [of wrongful conviction] is not only a defining feature of the modern death penalty, but it also results in the disproportionate conviction and execution of innocent Black people,” the report states. 

The most prevalent contributor to wrongful convictions in these cases was official misconduct, where police ran shoddy investigations or state prosecutors withheld evidence that indicated the defendant might actually be innocent, like in Graves’ case. The report cites a DPI study that found that in 85 percent of death penalty exonerations of Black people from 1973-2017, police or prosecutors had committed some sort of misconduct in the investigation or trial. (This is compared to 70 percent of cases where the exoneree was white.) 

In about two-thirds of total death row exonerations, someone gave false testimony on the stand. Non-diverse juries, also present in Graves’ case, were more likely to wrongfully convict. Mistaken eyewitnesses, unreliable scientific experts, and junk forensic sciences also placed many innocent people behind bars.

The report highlights that more than half of the people exonerated from death row in the United States in the past 52 years have been Black. But data shows innocence claims from Black prisoners are perhaps more difficult to prove—DPI found that Black death row exonerees have to spend on average four more years fighting their cases compared to white exonerees. 

To Graves, the reality of this disparate treatment was evident to him from the beginning. “They used my Blackness as evidence against me to sentence me to death,” he said.

Megan Byrne, an attorney with the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project and the lead author of the report, told the Observer the report is meant to educate people on the throughline between historical lynching of Black people and the modern application of the death penalty. She said racial bias manifests at all levels of the criminal justice system: from the ways laws are written, to how policing is conducted, to whom prosecutors choose to seek the death penalty against. 

“Who is believed, and who isn’t, at different stages of investigation and conviction?” she said. “The way that bias affects the system is such a multifaceted issue, the solution also has to be multifaceted.”

While the report only analyzes exonerations, Byrne said that there are many more people who have had their cases overturned for other reasons or who are still sitting on death rows. The report also states that 21 people executed in the United States were likely innocent—10 of those cases came from Texas. 

One man, Carlos DeLuna, was executed in 1989 for the stabbing death of gas station clerk Wanda Lopez in Corpus Christi. He had pointed to another man, Carlos Hernandez, as the actual culprit. Authorities knew about Hernandez, whose criminal record included assaults very similar to the fatal stabbing in 1983. They didn’t test, and later lost, evidence that could have revealed the real killer’s DNA. 

In recent years, Texas legislators have passed laws aiming to reduce the chances of wrongful conviction in state courts. The 2013 Michael Morton Act, named after a man who spent nearly 25 years in prison after prosecutors withheld evidence, requires that the state turn over all evidence to the defense and to track what they’ve disclosed. The Richard Miles Act, which became law in 2021, requires police to ensure they’ve turned over all evidence to the state in the first place, including information learned after a conviction.

A Dallas county jury convicted Richard Miles of murder and attempted murder and sentenced him to 60 years in prison in 1995. He was released in 2009 and fully exonerated in 2012. Although not a death penalty case, Miles’ appeals lawyer Cheryl Wattley said Miles’ and other exonerations from Texas prisons prove the system can fail no matter what sentence is on the table.

“We shouldn’t exhale and say, ‘Well at least it’s not a death penalty case,’” Wattley said. “By taking away someone’s life, be it by execution or by confinement, we still are depriving that individual through a wrongful conviction of their right to their life.”

Still, exonerations are incredibly difficult to obtain in Texas courts. They require costly and time-consuming appeals, and many people can’t afford post-conviction lawyers or can’t get the attention of organizations like the Innocence Project and Centurion Ministries, which offer free representation. In most cases, there is no DNA or forensic evidence that could back up someone’s innocence claims.

“DNA proved that [wrongful convictions] happened,” Wattley said. “On the other hand, DNA created such a high bar, such a high standard of almost absolute scientific certainty for demonstrating that it’s indeed a wrongful conviction.” 

Recent high-profile innocence claims, including those of Robert Roberson and Melissa Lucio, indicate that there are more people on Texas’ death row who may have been put there for crimes that they didn’t commit—and who may see exonerations in their lifetimes. 

The post New Report Highlights the ‘Fatal Flaws’ Behind Wrongful Capital Convictions appeared first on The Texas Observer.

19 Nov 2025

PWHL: Frost take first aim at third title on Friday

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The sounds of slap shots, hockey pucks bouncing off Plexiglas and skates scratching up the ice filled the empty halls of Grand Casino Arena on Monday as the Minnesota Frost held their first full team practice ahead of Friday’s season opener.

Coming off back-to-back Walter Cup championships in the first two seasons of the Professional Women’s Hockey League, the Frost are halfway to matching a feat accomplished by the Houston Comets when they finished atop the WNBA in its first four seasons of existence (1997-2000).

Claire Thompson #42 and Britta Curl-Salemme #77 of the Minnesota Frost celebrate the win against the Ottawa Charge during the third overtime at Xcel Energy Center on May 24, 2025 in St Paul, Minnesota. The Minnesota Frost defeated the Ottawa Charge 2-1 in this game to take the lead (2-1) in the best of five series.(Adam Bettcher/Getty Images)

But before this new group of Frost players can chase history, they need to establish a camaraderie and chemistry after a large roster overhaul.

“Right now, we’re not worried about championships,” head coach Ken Klee said. “It’s the beginning of the season; we’re worried about the process, how we’re going to prepare every day, how we work, how we’re going to get better.

“To me, that’s how you win. You win by getting better all year and then peaking at the right time.”

The Frost begin that quest with the season opener against Toronto on Friday at Grand Casino Arena. Puck drop is set for 6 p.m.

Teams from Seattle and Vancouver will boost the PWHL to eight teams this winter, and the Frost lost forwards Brooke McQuigge and Denisa Křížová in the expansion draft, the ace defenders Sophie Jaques and Claire Thompson — two of the league’s three finalists for Defensive Player of the Year — to Vancouver in free agency.

Klee thinks the team may weather those blue line losses by signing Sydney Morin from Boston and using their first-round draft pick on Kendall Cooper of Quinnipiac. And the Frost retained international superstar Lee Stecklein, a keystone of the Frost’s two titles.

Goaltenders Maddie Rooney and Nicole Hensley are back, too, as is wing Britta Curl-Salemme, who signed a contract extension. Star forwards Kendall Coyne Schofield and Taylor Heise, return as well. So, the cupboard is far from bare.

This week the new iteration practiced as a unit at TRIA Rink for the first time.

“I think now that we have our full group intact … it’s looking very promising,” second-year forward Katy Knoll said. “Our team is looking a lot different, but I think all the returners and the veterans are doing a great job of kind of bringing everyone in and showing everyone the ropes and the systems and everything.”

Klee is expecting Knoll and Curl-Salemme to step up in their roles as forwards. Both scored game-winning, overtime goals in the Walter Cup Finals against Ottawa, and Curl-Salemme signed a two-year extension on Oct. 6.

“Our forward group is deep, and it’s really good,” Klee said. “So, I think it’s huge. You look at all those players, you look at Katy, you look at Dominique Petrie, you look at Britta. I think they’re all going to take big steps in their game.”

With many of the players expecting friends and family to come into St. Paul for the season opener, the Frost are looking forward to raising a second banner before puck drop. They’re also eager to take aim and a third title in as many seasons.

“I think you just take it one week at a time,” Curl-Salemme said. “We have a big home opener on Friday, so just starting well and feeling like we can move forward and find new things to work on, because if you’re not getting better throughout the whole season, you’re not going to have much of a chance at the end.”

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19 Nov 2025

Jurors to hear closing arguments in trial of Ohio officer charged in the killing of Ta’Kiya Young

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By PATRICK AFTOORA-ORSAGOS and JULIE CARR SMYTH, Associated Press

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Closing arguments in the murder trial of an Ohio officer charged in the shooting death of a pregnant Black mother killed in a supermarket parking lot after being accused of shoplifting are set for Wednesday.

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Prosecutors have told jurors that 21-year-old Ta’Kiya Young wasn’t a threat to anyone at the time she was shot. Defense attorneys for Blendon Township police officer Connor Grubb have emphasized that Young’s vehicle carried deadly force when she accelerated it near the 31-year-old officer, rendering his use of force within the standard of being “objectively reasonable.”

Grubb is charged with murder, involuntary manslaughter and felonious assault in connection with Young’s death on Aug. 24, 2023. He faces up to life in prison. Franklin County Common Pleas Judge David Young, no relation to Ta’Kiya, dropped four of 10 counts against him Tuesday that related to the death of Young’s unborn daughter, agreeing with his attorneys that prosecutors failed to present proof that Grubb knew Young was pregnant when he shot her.

The prosecution and defense both rested Tuesday after a roughly two-week trial. Jurors were shown the bodycam footage of the shooting on the first day of testimony, with testimony following over the trial’s course including from a use-of-force expert, an accident reconstructionist, the officer who responded to the scene with Grubb and a police policy expert.

They never heard from Grubb, whose side of the story was contained in a written statement read into the record by a special agent for the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation.

Sean Walton, an attorney representing Young’s family, Nadine Young, Ta’Kiya’s grandmother, and an aunt, Michelle White, said they expected Grubb to take the stand.

“It is curious that he did not testify. But the video speaks for itself and if he wants the video to speak for him, then so be it,” Walton said.

Young and White appeared emotionally tired while taking questions from reporters Tuesday. White said that the verdict will allow the family “to finally be able to start the healing process.” At various times, Nadine held back tears while talking about the toll of the trial.

“I just gotta hold on to God and just know, God, he’s in control,” Nadine said.

FILE – Nadine Young, grandmother of Ta’Kiya Young, shows her shirt to reporters after arraignment proceedings of Blendon Township police officer Connor Grubb, Aug. 14, 2024, at the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas in Columbus. (AP Photo/David Dermer, file)

In the body camera footage, the officer said he observed Young arguing with his fellow officer and positioned himself in front of her vehicle to provide backup and to protect other people in the parking lot. He said he drew his gun after he heard Young fail to comply with his partner’s commands. When she drove toward him, he said in the statement, he felt her car hit his legs and shins and begin to lift his body off the ground.

Grubb and another officer approached Young’s car outside a Kroger in suburban Columbus about a report that she was suspected of stealing alcohol from the store. She partially lowered her window, and the other officer ordered her out. Instead, she rolled her car forward toward Grubb, who fired a single bullet through her windshield into her chest, video footage showed.

The video showed an officer at the driver’s side window telling Young she was accused of shoplifting and ordering her out of the car. Young protested, and both officers cursed at her and yelled at her to get out. Young could be heard asking them, “Are you going to shoot me?”

Then she turned the steering wheel to the right, the car rolled slowly forward and Grubb fired his gun, footage showed. Moments later, after the car came to a stop against the building, they broke the driver’s side window. Police said they tried to save her life, but she was mortally wounded. Young and her unborn daughter were subsequently pronounced dead at a hospital.

A full-time officer with the township since 2019, Grubb was placed paid administrative leave after the shooting.