How to earn Membership Rewards points with American Express FX International Payments

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• rwllr says:

  15 Jan15 January 03:41

  Does anyone have any reference points for comparison to TransferWise?
  I feel that that’s the benchmark that you need to compare anything against.

  • John says:

    15 Jan15 January 07:18

    When I looked into it they wanted 2.5%-3% above spot, transferwise I believe is 0.5%.

    Looking at the reader comment in the article it seems they are more interested in the big money and not so much in piddly amounts like I send.

    • Vincent says:

      15 Jan15 January 09:26

      Although personal Transferwise gives better rates (they also have business accounts) – to transfer large amounts of money takes considerable amount of time whilst Amex is usually 1 working day.

      If you compare Transferwise business to Amex, the rates are far closer and there’s no question that Amex is better – even without the inclusion of MR.

      • Ian M says:

        15 Jan15 January 12:56

        I have a Transferwise business account, transfers are normally very fast. Normally same day for GBP-EUR, GBP-AUD. I’ll be amazed if Amex can match or beat the rates from Transferwise, but keen to find out.

        • Terry says:

          15 Jan15 January 15:02

          Many providers like Currency Fair (always better rates) and Azimo (better rates sometimes) beat TransferWise by a mile. For Amex, like others said you have to negotiate, they are excellent for transfers on popular currency pairs.

• Ben says:

  15 Jan15 January 07:29

  We use this service for as long as I remember – maybe 10 years? – and it’s great. We send payments for nominal value too so AMEX accept everything. Yes, even if the payment is for ONE Euro. I kid you not.

  We often compare the rates to TransferWise and as one can accept, there will be winners and losers. However when we need to buy a few thousands of X currency (even if split between dozens of payees), we alway call them and get a better rate.

  I just use a free AMEX card associated with the service to collect the MR points as I’m not an AMEX points collector otherwise.

  There is another option to double up the points you get by using the EURO/Dollar platinum cards but it was too much of a hassle for me.

  One last point, the terms do state that points will be awarded only for payments value more than £1000 but I’m certain they reward the points for the accumulated value of all payments in a day/month.

  • Andy says:

    15 Jan15 January 12:18

    Can you please explain how you can double up with a currency card?

    • Ben says:

      15 Jan15 January 13:55

      From memory, as it was a long time ago when they explained the option to me, the currency statement of card would be settled by the Amex fx account so you get points from the card and then points from the fx service.

      • guesswho2000 says:

        16 Jan16 January 08:04

        Haven’t tried it, but the ICCs do seem to award points for everything, even the annual fee.

• Ben says:

  15 Jan15 January 07:47

  Reading some of the comments in here let me add to my previous message:

  rates are negotiable.

  Even the base rates. When we started using the service we paid more and over time they dropped the margin they add.

  The £5 per transaction mentioned in the article was indeed something that was there at the start but was taken off and today we don’t pay any of these.

  The only time we pay an extra fee is when we ask them to transfer GBP to an overseas account.

• Chas says:

  15 Jan15 January 09:37

  🤔

  • Chas says:

    15 Jan15 January 09:38

    Starts thinking of paying off his IDC this way to double up….

• Neil Donoghue says:

  15 Jan15 January 10:03

  I have been using this service for two years and highly rate it! For my business, the rates are perfect and of course I get 56 days credit so it’s a win win!

• Omar says:

  15 Jan15 January 11:08

  Slightly O/T why cant the UK residents get a card like the American Express Hilton Aspire card that our friends across the pond get? The benefits are amazing.

  • Rhys says:

    15 Jan15 January 11:12

    Because our American friends across the pond can pay 1%+ on interchange fees whilst we have them capped at 0.3%!

    • TGLoyalty says:

      15 Jan15 January 11:18

      I don’t think that is all of the problem. The cards over here were never as good as the USA even before the cap.

      US cards all offer 0% FX, better bonuses for travel or restaurants etc

      The answer is probably there’s more competition as well as the operators make more money.

      • Alex says:

        15 Jan15 January 11:55

        Yep, exactly, it’s a combination of:
        – uncapped fees (and less financial regulation in general)
        – way more competition
        – much larger market

    • RussellH says:

      15 Jan15 January 16:01

      1%??
      Smaller businesses are often paying 5% to Amex (and not much less to Visa/MC) in the USA.

      As to the 0% FX fees, the majority of Americans never leave the country, so it is a cheap offer. Crossing the Canadian border does not necessarily require a passport – a number of alternatives are still available, though things are a lot tighter now, I read, than they used to be.

    • Riccatti says:

      16 Jan16 January 03:51

      Occurs to me that market size plays the bigger role.

      AMEX UK has to run full headquarters and be profitable as a business unit. It has much less revenue to do so than 327-million strong US market (plus widespread AMEX acceptance, and yes up to 5% swipe fees accepted by US companies as cost of doing business — but daily staples are more expensive in the U.S.)

      • guesswho2000 says:

        16 Jan16 January 08:09

        Agreed, and don’t forget the UK market is very resistant to annual fees on cards, even small fees don’t seem to be well tolerated.

        Australia has similarly been capped in terms of swipe fees (0.8%), and rewards were hit, but not nearly to the extent they were in the UK, the key difference (that I can see) is that rewards cards almost all come with annual fees.

• George says:

  15 Jan15 January 11:26

  I’ve been using this service for 3 years now and it’s a good earner, around 150,000 MR points a year. However, you need to negotiate hard with them. My spread is around 20 points so if say the GBP/EUR spot rate is 1.1755-58, my rate to buy EUR is 1.1735. Originally they wanted a larger spread but I talked them down to 20 points because I had another company who was willing to do it for 14 points on my kind of volumes. So my opportunity cost ends up being just about a penny per MR point. But given that this is a business expense and tax deductible, my real cost is much lower after tax, probably half a penny. But you really need to compare at what cost you can get it for elsewhere and calculate your after tax cost per point to decide whether it’s worth it or not. But yes, I agree it’s a great service and they don’t charge extra to make the transfer overseas.

  • Mzungu says:

    15 Jan15 January 15:23

    I’ve been using this for 9 years, and I agree that you need to negotiate the rate. I probably don’t have your volumes, my margin is 0.5% – on selling USD and EUR. I’m probably unusual on here in that I’m a seller not a buyer. Do keep an eye on them though, I agreed the 0.5% margin and it stayed there for a while, then started to creep up around 0.6-.7%. Each time I challenge it, they revert to 0.5%, then is starts to creep up again after a few months…

    Also agree that I’ve never been charged transaction fees.

    Only pity is that it used to be 1MR/£10, they reduced it to 1MR/£20 in April 2013. Perhaps that was the start of the Amex benefits reductions!

• RussellH says:

  15 Jan15 January 16:08

  I too used this service in the past. At the time I only had an MBNA Amex, and had never heard of MR points, so did not understand fully the offer being mad,so missed out on the points, but I found it a good value service to start with. I only used it for about a year, though, as they told me that they had offered me a time limited fee-free deal, which had come to an end.
  🙁
  I probably made too many lowish value forward transactions – easily possible with an online gateway, while the other firms I dealt with were all telephone only at the time.

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