Sears Mastercard To Be Replaced

Boatnmaniac

This is an FYI for those who have a Sears Mastercard account:

Yesterday I received a letter from Citi stating that this credit card will be replaced on 4/12/2025 with a new Citi ThankYou Mastercard. The account number will not be changing so the current Sears Mastercard credit card can continue to be used for purchases until the new replacement card is received and activated in May-June.

What remains to be seen is how this might impact downloading of transactions. Currently, Sears Mastercard is a Citi retail card with it's own unique EWC (QWin….Quicken Connect for QMac) download connection setup. Will this setup still work as is or will it be changed? If it will be changed:

1. Will it simply be a change to the name of the financial institution to something else (such as, maybe "Sears Mastercard" being changed to "ThankYou Mastercard") but will still remain a unique Citi retail card financial institution with an EWC/Quicken Connect download connection?
2. Or will it be retired and then we will need to set up downloading via one of the Citi.com financial institutions (such as Citi Cards) with an EWC+ and/or DC connection?

My guess is that it will be #2 that happens but that is simply a guess.

Hopefully, there will be information about how this change might impact transactions downloading provided by Quicken and/or from Citi.

Boatnmaniac

UPDATE: The last 4 days I did not encounter any issues during OSU for this card in my main data file, transactions downloaded and the online balance correctly updated.

But for the last 4 days in TEST1 file this card returned the CC-503 error code and troubleshooting did not resolve it. I logged into my online account but the website had limited functionality and it would automatically log me out when I would click on some links while other links returned unexpected information or a blank screen.

Today I did Add Account to add this card to TEST2 file. Instead of setting me up with the historical EWC connection it set me up with the EWC+ connection.

I then reopened the TEST1 file and Deactivated this Sears card and tried to set up the connection, again, via Add Account and got the CC-503 error code. But then I made a slight change to the Account Name and tried doing Add Account, again. This time I was set up with an EWC+ connection and transactions downloaded and the online balance was correctly updated.

These EWC+ authorizations were done on the Sears Citi Retail Services website, not on Citi.com. So, it looks like this provides some answers to the questions raised in the original post above.

(Since the EWC connection worked in my primary data file, I did not try to change the connection to EWC+. I will wait until I am forced to do this.)