Reply To: Dear Amex, are you on glue???

[JDB]

SteveJ wrote:

@JDB TBH Barclays and Barclaycard had some pretty daft SUBS only this year. Everyone else mentioned credit cards is just part of a wider portfolio, Amex are unique in that credit cards are the only game they are in, hence new customer generation and churn protection are crucial metrics.

Barclays was a new market entrant in the premium paid market so they had to make a big noise and they will have gained at least some cross selling from the 100k promo which I doubt is an offer we will see very often. They are quite sparing with the 50k.

The point I was making is that Amex very often isn’t actually generating new customers but rather encouraging old customers to go away for two years only to say they are then ‘new’ customers. They allow you to downgrade or upgrade and that = a ‘new’ customer. Well, for most of us neither of those aren’t is a new customer, they are just people you have paid to turn up to the party; it’s costly and totally fake.

You shouldn’t need “churn protection” if the product is good and there is, in the UK, no competitor to the Big Three Amex cards.