Stop paying amex personal bill with business or face closure.

[Italia888]

Anyone else been warned to stop paying their amex personal account bill with their business bank?

I’ve been warned today via email and a subsequent call to the call centre.

“We’re writing to inform you that following a review of your Card account, we have identified a number of payments by third parties to your Account. Payments to your Account should always come from an account in your name.”

For years I have made business spends on my personal amex card and paid the bill off with my ltd business debit card in my name.

Today I have been told new policy means I can no longer do this and if I continue my account will be closed down.

[BA Flyer IHG Stayer]

There have been several threads on the Amex forum about this topic over the past few months.

It does appear they are stopping people using business bank accounts to pay off personal cards.

I suppose you could always reimburse your personal bank account from your business account and then use your personal account to pay your personal Amex card bill.

[Italia888]

Glad I’m not the only one then.

I guess I’ll just have to reimburse from my personal account, makes accounting a little more messy but no real alternative for the foreseeable.
The reason being they offer the business amex but I was declined due to my business not having enough credit history. Maybe that’s an option further down the road.

Strange policy though, the agent even said I can see you are the director of the company sending the payments so we can verify nothing unexplainable is going on. If that’s the case why not just accept payments from the same named directors.

[JDB]

This is something being pushed by the FCA and HMRC. Amex wants to know the source of funds and really doesn’t want to be identifying the directors etc. As far as they are concerned it’s a third party payment that raises concerns.

It’s actually much cleaner and preferred by HMRC for the company to reimburse you for expenses and then pay your personal card yourself. If you ever had a tax investigation, any payments from the company directly to a supplier for any personal expenses will raise a red flag even if they are properly incurred.

[AJA]

As @JDB says just put in an expense claim to your business for the spend incurred on your personal Amex. Your company bank account pays your personal account and then you pay your personal Amex bill. It’s one extra step but far cleaner for your business expenses.