American Express brings back a minimum income requirement for its cards

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• PaulC says:

  20 Jul20 July 04:33

  So out of touch..

  • P4D says:

    20 Jul20 July 06:38

    Huh?

  • Mike Hunt says:

    20 Jul20 July 06:40

    I know – I thought the figures would be much higher, they are not exactly hard to reach.

• JellyFan says:

  20 Jul20 July 05:10

  Are these news limits going to be applied retroactively?

  I.e. will someone who has held the Platinum Card or BAPP for years now be ineligible, and have their card suspended?

  • Gothbe says:

    20 Jul20 July 05:21

    My son was asked to submit a payslip as part of a recent application, but despite being above the new limits and living at home was turned down

    • Gothbe says:

      20 Jul20 July 05:22

      Replied to wrong post

  • Retron says:

    20 Jul20 July 12:44

    They haven’t been so far – I have a BAPP (since 2016) and earn £34K, not enough to reach the threshold. I do have investment income which takes me comfortably above, and I can only assume they take that into account.

    Earlier this year I had to confirm my income when logging into the card website, IIRC it included investment income as well as wages.

• Lindsay East says:

  20 Jul20 July 05:13

  How do they check?

  • Rui N. says:

    20 Jul20 July 06:04

    They usually don’t, but if they do, lying on your application is fraud.

  • Chris R says:

    20 Jul20 July 07:19

    They’ll use income verification services via the credit bureaus. Not 100% accurate but gives them an idea of the confidence factor of the income you’ve provided. If it mismatches enough, they’ll ask for proof.

  • JDB says:

    20 Jul20 July 07:26

    @Lindsay East – Amex generally operates like HMRC ie file now, check later. Amex will initially accept your word having carried out basic checks and look in more detail later and, as advised by @Rui N, they rely on the fact that most people know (and tick to confirm they know) that using false information to apply for credit is a criminal offence.

  • Gavin says:

    20 Jul20 July 11:20

    National Hunter probably- if there is a mis match they will ask for proof. if you have lied expect a CIFAS marker on your credit file for 2 years, something nobody wants.

• Gothbe says:

  20 Jul20 July 05:18

  That’s a serious blow to collecting opportunities where retired and/or non working family members are referred and add a bigger earner / spender as a supplementary

  • lees says:

    20 Jul20 July 09:18

    That would be the reason why Amex have introduced this I suspect

    • Roy says:

      20 Jul20 July 10:49

      I think you hit the mail on the head. Just like the new ban on putting business spending through a personal card.

      They’re clamping down on all the more, erm, “creative” uses of their cards to earn vast rewards (at their expense).

      • Rob says:

        20 Jul20 July 10:58

        Putting business spend on a personal credit card means you are fraudulently availing yourself of Section 75 insurance for B2B transactions.

        Perhaps more key, you’re costing Amex 1% or so in lost merchant fees vs a business card.

        • Dominic says:

          20 Jul20 July 11:46

          I hadn’t seen this. Does that apply to business expenses which I claim back from my employer?

        • ken says:

          20 Jul20 July 13:17

          perfectly legal to use a personal credit card for business.
          Literally millions of small businesses, sole traders and employees do this.

          You wouldn’t ‘fraudulently availing youreslf’ of Section 75 unless you actually claimed.

          The best reason for not doing it is that you are an unsecured creditor in the event of the business not being able to repay you.

        • will says:

          20 Jul20 July 17:53

          Perfectly legal although it may breach the card agreement terms.

        • Roy says:

          20 Jul20 July 20:56

          Ah, so it was always implicitly prohibited, and it’s just that the new T&C’s are more explicit?

          I do wonder if this is related to the Consumer Duty, but in a rather more oblique way than most people are assuming.

          If they fail to effectively crack down on the creative abuse of their products that some people engage in, then the rest of us are cross-subsidising those people who are gaming the system.

          It could well be argued that it’s not possible for them to provide fair value to those of us *not* pushing the boundaries in that case (assuming they don’t want to run their product at a loss).

        • Track says:

          21 Jul21 July 12:24

          @Rob, how about those companies/corporations that accept or even ask employees to spend on personal cards and be reimbursed.

          Are they deliberately pushing their employees to unlawful behaviour?

        • Rob says:

          21 Jul21 July 13:34

          The stuff you do as an employee (hotel, coffee, meal) isn’t going to be picked up as corporate spend. Viking Direct, Facebook, AWS, WeWork …. different story. But, yes, your employer is asking you to break the terms of your card and your card is now more likely to be cancelled than it was.

      • Roy says:

        20 Jul20 July 21:09

        @Dominic @ken @will

        The recent notification of changes of Amex T&C’s explicitly mentions this.

        I just checked the email: one of the bullet points in the email summarizing the changes is “we’ll clarify that the card is for personal use and not to be used for business purposes”. The use of the word “clarifying” supports Rob’s position that it was never actually permissible.

        Still, the fact that they’re making it far more explicit is probably a prelude to then enforcing it more strictly.

        (The quoted text is from an email relating to the Platinum card. I had a similar notification, on paper, relating to my ICC. I haven’t seen one for my BAPP yet but I think it’s safe to assume this will apply to all Amex cards in due course.)

• BJ says:

  20 Jul20 July 05:26

  Excludes my retired mum. My dad is ok even for BAPP and Platinum provided they don’t hike the requurements to an unannounced £50k with unspecified dates again for boosted SUB . I think that was very bad, amex effectively saying “we will give you the card but if you’re a bit ‘richer’ we’ll give you a bigger bonus for the same price as somebody who’s a bit ‘poorer’. These income thresholds need to be fixed, not promotion-dependent.

• ChasP says:

  20 Jul20 July 05:30

  This is serious bad news.
  Retired no mortgage or other debts, no dependents and halfway through my 24 months before taking out my next BAPP but nowhere near £35k income

  • Andrew J says:

    20 Jul20 July 06:00

    Maybe this is another way Amex are trying to avoid this approach and to encourage people to just keep their cards rather than the cancel and reapply cycle.

    • BJ says:

      20 Jul20 July 06:10

      There are much easier ways to do that.

  • BJ says:

    20 Jul20 July 06:30

    It may well change again before you reach 24m.

    • JDB says:

      20 Jul20 July 07:51

      Yes, the ridiculous 24 months rule should be the next domino to fall. It’s taken Amex seven years after they stopped pro-rata refunds in the US to introduce that here and once in a lifetime (sometimes seven years) SUBs were introduced prior to that. The concept of paying large SUBs to welcome back customers after just two years is a bit ridiculous, although increasingly many will get caught out by being rejected.

      • BBbetter says:

        20 Jul20 July 11:34

        Wait, are you saying a rejected application will reset the 2 year rule?

• His Holyness says:

  20 Jul20 July 05:39

  What about the ARCC?

  • His Holyness says:

    20 Jul20 July 05:40

    I see, £20k

• Harry T says:

  20 Jul20 July 06:04

  Surprised the income requirements are so low, especially for the Platinum card.

  • BJ says:

    20 Jul20 July 06:17

    Shockingly it still excludes most junior doctors I believe?

    • Alex says:

      20 Jul20 July 06:18

      It includes the vast majority of teachers no matter if they live alone or with say another teacher

      • polly says:

        20 Jul20 July 06:59

        But, excludes the vast majority of nurses, and blue light employees. Shameful move.

        • JDB says:

          20 Jul20 July 07:41

          @Polly – why is is shameful that the new requirements for Plat (and BAPP) exclude the categories you mention? Does that mean that the banks should all abandon their ‘shameful’ Premier limits at £75k as well? Isn’t it worse that Amex Plat insurance excludes the 1/3 of the population that has hypertension or takes statins? Plat was originally pitched as a premium product that had some cachet, but now it may have some negative value. They assumed the UK market was the same as the US one for Plat. If they tidied up and rewrote the insurance, smartened and simplified the benefits and set an income limit at the Premier level of banks, they might start to have a much more successful and desirable product.

          Amex Plat has a similar problem to M&S clothing; it has no idea who its customer is and can’t make up its mind which customer it wants. Until they decide that, it won’t go anywhere as the price they have to pay for people to take out and then maintain the card will stay high for the tiny group it attracts/works for.

        • Will says:

          20 Jul20 July 08:16

          It definitely does not exclude the vast majority of nurses, the average nurse now earns above £35k after the last pay revision.

        • Icewhite says:

          21 Jul21 July 12:52

          @JDB Perfect perfect analogy.

      • Alex says:

        20 Jul20 July 07:18

        Was meant to say excludes

    • Alan says:

      20 Jul20 July 08:01

      Indeed – I had to laugh at the “25%+ wage inflation” comment in the article. By comparison over this period it’s been 15% for doctors (much less if you go further back to 2011/2012 and include the financial crisis too where there was a public sector pay freeze).

      • jj says:

        20 Jul20 July 14:34

        Across the whole economy, there has been a 32% rise in seasonally adjusted total pay since 2016 according to the Office for National Statistics.

      • Sharka says:

        20 Jul20 July 20:05

        Yes, those GPs will only get £250,000 or so for three days a week, plus access (despite being self-employed) to a final salary NHS pension scheme.

    • Will says:

      20 Jul20 July 08:10

      Despite the media attention, you’ll struggle to find even a Y1 junior doctor on less than £35k.
      As they progress they’re on significantly more than that in later years as a junior.

      • Alan says:

        20 Jul20 July 17:23

        That’s when you add in lots of overtime though for working nights and weekends.

        • will says:

          20 Jul20 July 17:57

          1. Overtime is part of peoples pay
          2. FY2 only needs to earn an additional £1000 in overtime / unsociable hours to be earning £35k. Beyond FY2 a full time junior’s basic is well above £35k.

    • BBbetter says:

      20 Jul20 July 11:30

      Who cares?

  • JDB says:

    20 Jul20 July 06:58

    Yes, it’s absurd to have the minimum income for Platinum, the supposed flagship product, pitched at just above the UK median salary. No wonder it struggles so badly.

    • polly says:

      20 Jul20 July 07:06

      And Plat will struggle even more now. At least card holders felt they could recoup the fee with the credits offered. Now, they won’t even get that chance. Each of us on our own, are just under that Plat bracket, but combined, we qualify. Total nonsense. And 2/3rds of that goes to Amex. Madness.
      Got to apply for OH BAPP asap tho, will give it a try.

      • BBbetter says:

        20 Jul20 July 11:31

        They need to scrap credits completely, reduce fees and push income requirements up.

        • polly says:

          20 Jul20 July 22:35

          Really?? That’s harsh.

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