American Express brings back a minimum income requirement for its cards

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• Ken says:

  20 Jul20 July 08:53

  I think any company doling out paid for cards to people with an income less than the minimum wage is frankly mad.
  It seems inherently against the consumer duty regulations.

  • Rob says:

    20 Jul20 July 09:00

    So you’re saying that if I sell HfP for multi-billions and go back to loafing around (which I did for a bit when I left banking) I shouldn’t be allowed a credit card?

    • Brian P says:

      20 Jul20 July 09:09

      If you sell head for points for multi billions you won’t need credit cards or points 🙂 you can be one of those shocking shoppers who puts everything on a debit card!!

    • NorthernLass says:

      20 Jul20 July 09:14

      I haven’t got multi-billions but I have got very healthy bank accounts due to retirement lump sums, mortgage nearly paid off. My pension would only qualify me for the gold card!

    • Ken says:

      20 Jul20 July 09:28

      A customer who claims billions of assets but no income (none of those assets earning an income?) at all sounds more like a Mexican drug dealer or African kleptocrat than a customer.

      • Rob says:

        20 Jul20 July 10:19

        Investment income is unlikely to count.

        • AJA says:

          20 Jul20 July 10:42

          So if you are astute enough to hold £1 million in an ISA earning 5% tax free per annum Amex will reject you for either the BAPP or the Platinum card.

          There are at least 100 new millionaires each year from the Euromillions lottery. Amex would reject them too?

        • QFFlyer says:

          20 Jul20 July 11:35

          Would appear to be one of the options you can select in the application, no guarantees they’ll accept it as qualifying (might be trying to weed out people in that category too, I suppose) – Salary, including contractual bonus; Investment and/or rental income; Private benefits; Pension; State benefits; Student grants and/or bursaries.

        • ken says:

          20 Jul20 July 12:05

          So dividends only count if they are from your own (or a close) company ?

          So drawdown income counts but not income from investments in an ISA ?

          I’m surprised (to say the least) particularly when application says personal annual income and has tick boxes for employment / investment income / rental income / private benefits / student grants or bursaries / pension.

          There is then a further optional space for additional annual income.

        • StanTheMan says:

          20 Jul20 July 13:36

          ” Private benefits ” feels like a catch all for a zero earner who gets a few grand a month from their decent earning partner…..

      • Lady London says:

        20 Jul20 July 14:29

        I think we’ll find the criteria on non-payroll income quietly relaxed as soon as Amex has had a chance to develop expertise and internal policy for evaluating this. Amex will probably do it before many others, as well.

        After all, Amex’s target customer is more likely to have complex income sources, than ordinary customers.

    • Numpty says:

      20 Jul20 July 09:59

      You’d get a Centurian card wouldn’t you? Maybe a Nando’s black card too, maybe not.

    • The Savage Squirrel says:

      20 Jul20 July 13:31

      I’m going to take a wild guess and say that if you had 8 or more figures of verifiable readily available liquid assets and give Amex, or any consumer-facing financial institution, a call (although you’d have people to do that sort of thing for you, obvs) then maybe they just might be able to look at your situation on an individual basis 😀 .

  • RussellH says:

    20 Jul20 July 09:39

    If someone is not paying you minimum wage, you should be reporting them to HMRC long before you worry about whether Amex will accept you as a card holder.

    • Jay says:

      20 Jul20 July 17:18

      No requirement for a company to pay a director minimum wage.

• Lloyd says:

  20 Jul20 July 09:16

  Great move from Amex…Not. So to hold the BAPP which has a £250 fee, I need an income of £35k. I can earn a 241 voucher and use it for business class. However, I don’t earn £35k. Therefore, I have to spend more to earn the 241 voucher, which is only valid in economy class. So much for the incentive of wanting to collect avios.

  • Freddy says:

    20 Jul20 July 10:15

    How much of your post-tax income were you gonna put through your amex?!

  • lumma says:

    20 Jul20 July 12:18

    The free card is likely used by people to earn a few extra Avios and most won’t aim for the voucher.

    Someone on say £29k with student loan gets around £1750pa net. After you pay rent, you’re going to struggle to put 10k or 12k through to get the voucher and you’re less likely to have an expense account to generate credit card spend above your personal outgoings.

    To me, it kind of makes sense that they want you to earn enough to maximise what you can get for the annual fee.

    • LittleNick says:

      20 Jul20 July 13:51

      But if said earner lives at home so doesn’t pay rent their disposable income is suddenly much higher which is a lot of cases now (only anecdotally). In addition those living at home can put family expenses on said earner’s amex card hitting any spend requirements.

• JimP says:

  20 Jul20 July 09:22

  This explains why my wife was turned down for a BAPP card last week. We have both held AMEX cards for many years, changing over the main card every 6 months and then 2 years when that rule changed. We are both retired and without mortgage. Her pension is below £20K but my income is still substantially higher. 4 years ago she qualified for her card and her monthly bill was paid by direct debit from my bank account. Never a problem. Last week I recommend her for the BAPP to get the introductory Avios. She was turned down so we phoned AMEX to be told that they were no longer willing to do what had happened in the past, despite our long association with them. I asked what the threshold is but was told that no member of staff knew this so this could not be answered. I went on to Experian afterwards and it had been checked and it told me that there was 0% chance of getting a travel credit card. There is also no appeal system.

• daftboy says:

  20 Jul20 July 09:30

  As others have noted, this is almost certainly driven by the FCA’s Consumer Duty rules which take effect this month (you may have also noticed you are getting lots of updates to T&Cs from your financial services providers, clarifying what certain terms in contracts mean etc)

  • Iain says:

    21 Jul21 July 20:14

    If the changes are indeed driven by the consumer duty rules they have been very oddly interpreted by Amex

    • Rob says:

      21 Jul21 July 21:03

      Not really. Put simply, you need to ensure that you are targeting your products to a suitable market. Now, this is designed to stop (for example) selling the self-employed PPI insurance that won’t pay out to self-employed people but all firms are impacted. Letting someone with no income (blocking the retired etc is a blunt instrument admittedly) apply for fee-paying credit cards when free cards are available would potentially fail the customer duty rules.

      You may have noticed that our card reviews now include a statement that reward cards have high interest rates and that you shouldn’t get a reward credit card if you run a balance. This was done for the same reason.

• Alex says:

  20 Jul20 July 09:31

  Thinking about how you could be a teacher who’s just won the lottery and has bought three houses on the back of it but you wouldn’t qualify for the Platinum card

  • Suzanne says:

    20 Jul20 July 09:52

    Most teachers earn over 35k, at least in London.

    • QFFlyer says:

      20 Jul20 July 11:40

      Main pay scale even for London and the fringe is significantly below £35k, which surprised me. M1/M2/M3 wouldn’t qualify. That said, even unqualified teachers at the very top of the scale would meet the requirement for a Platinum…didn’t even know an “unqualified teacher” was a thing.

      • Erico1875 says:

        20 Jul20 July 17:54

        My daughter is a teacher and she gets ar £47K +

• Peter K says:

  20 Jul20 July 09:37

  It’s a really blunt instrument isn’t it.

  It does seem strange that someone employed in a steady job at £34k can’t get a premium card, but a self employed person with an income of £35k one year can potentially get 3x premium cards with a total yearly cost of over £1400.

• Numpty says:

  20 Jul20 July 09:48

  The Amex meeting that set the income limits must have taken a whole minute, including introductions.

• DTR says:

  20 Jul20 July 10:11

  As with many here, removing household income will affect my OH. Wondering if downgrading via chat when no longer needed and upgrading is now the way to go. Or is an income check done for upgrading Gold to Plat? Can’t think if it’s possible to do BA to BAPP without a fresh application

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.