Get 5,000 Membership Rewards points (= 5,000 Avios) for a £100 American Express FX transfer

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• uk1 says:

  15 Nov15 November 08:53

  I wonder whether you can make qualifying payments into a paypal account?

  • Raffles says:

    15 Nov15 November 10:34

    I had a look at the Paypal website. They give a standard UK bank account into which you can make payments, so if you could get the IBAN number for that account then you’d be OK – but its not online and the idea of getting that data from the call centre does not fill me with enthusiasm.

• Morland says:

  15 Nov15 November 10:10

  Thanks very much for this spot Raffles – I have a bill to pay in France I was not looking forward to paying and 5k points eases the pain (just a little, but it helps). Also does Amex’s job as I didn’t know that they provided this service and I’ll use them in the future (earning more points…)

• James ardron says:

  15 Nov15 November 13:36

  If you used a Gold Card with the double points in first year, would this qualify as forigen spend as paying a non UK bank account.

  • Roger says:

    15 Nov15 November 13:43

    If you mean by using the gold card for payment, the answer is No because it can’t be used for payment.

    If you are asking whether the 5,000 bonus MRs become 10,000, I highly doubt it but it’s too soon to know as the bonuses don’t seem to have been awarded yet.

• Jibe says:

  15 Nov15 November 13:55

  Thanks for the response. It was inrelation to the potential doubling of the points

• Kim says:

  17 Nov17 November 12:15

  Hi Raffles, when you’re using the MBNA’s credit card to transfer fund into Amex, are they charging you for the transaction?

  • Raffles says:

    17 Nov17 November 13:40

    There is a post on this tomorrow. Basically, the Co-Op Bank (who banks MBNA and is where your money goes) has charged me £2.85 on a £105 transaction (ie 2.75%) to convert the £105 of Euros back to Sterling. Amex charged me £10. Total costs therefore £12.85. Good deal if I get the 5k, bad deal if I don’t because technically I sent it to a UK bank! I should be OK, though. No difference to Amex whether the Euros ended up in the UK or France.

    • Kim says:

      17 Nov17 November 17:18

      Thank Q … appreciate that.

    • Roger says:

      18 Nov18 November 11:23

      MBNA are charging 2.75%. For once, AmEx themselves seem to be undercutting the competition.

      Based on the limited experience of my single example, AmEx charged 1.75% F/X commission to send some Swiss franccs to a Swiss account.

      • Raffles says:

        18 Nov18 November 13:22

        It was the Co-Op who charged the 2.75%. MBNA has a Sterling bank account so it was the Co-Op that did the conversion so that the money could be deposited in their account.

• whitenoise says:

  20 Nov20 November 22:19

  I guess if you don’t have a foreign bank account this won’t work. Since even with the IBAN number it still wants to know the destination country, and United Kingdom isn’t listed. That is of course unless I’m missing something?

  • Raffles says:

    21 Nov21 November 07:03

    Yes, you’re missing something. When you actually try to do a transfer, the UK IS listed. That list when you sign up is simply a ‘favourites’ list and has no impact on what you can really do.

    As you can see from my example, I was successful in sending £105 (in Euros) to a UK bank account, in this case the UK bank account of MBNA credit cards.

• Trevor says:

  23 Nov23 November 20:25

  While a good idea and experiment (if you have no foreign account to send money to) to send money to your own credit card, why not take this one step further and just send money to your own bank account via the IBAN?

  I don’t normally need to perform international transfers and would also send to my MBNA card if your experiment does post the points, but as it turns out I do need to perform a transfer to SA (of a little less than £100, but I can recoup this later). So for the benefit of those without MBNA cards, I can report that the costs are almost the same to transfer money elsewhere (infact possibly less since the GBP:ZAR spread is probably worse than top currencies). The static charge of £10 is of course the same, but to change £100 to Rands is £2.66 worse than the best pick-up pre-order rate available (according to MSE), so total cost of £12.66 for 5,000 MR is very comparible to Raffles’ experiment.

  About to sign up, thanks for the tip 🙂

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