Big Amex UPDATES Coming in 2021 (Bloomberg) – The Credit Shifu

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Hey credit warriors and there was an article in Bloomberg a few days ago talking about the fact that American Express say that updates will be coming to what they call their proprietary cards, which are green, gold, platinum and Centurion, in 2021.

Here is a quote from CEO Steve Squeri:

“As we look at next year, and we obviously focus more on acquisitions and we do the product refreshes, we believe we’ll continue to grow our cards, which will continue to grow our card-fee revenue,”

So they are talking about acquisitions and also product refreshes. Now on the acquisitions side they often acquire companies that enhance services for existing cardholders. Like their acquisition of loungebuddy that provides data and booking services for airport lounges. Not that that is of any use now, every lounge seems to be temporarily closed.

Then their most recent acquisition was the small business loan provider Kabbage. A company which has disrupted the sector using non-traditional methods to approve loans to small businesses in a shorter time than it would take the big banks. Amex cites its large number of small business customers as a reason for the acquisition.

So we may see some new benefits coming to Amex credit cards through companies they acquire next year and it will be interesting to see what happens on that front. Then we may also just see new benefits added to cards to entice people to open accounts and to upgrade to the card above the one they have. Getting people on the upgrade wagon does seem to be part of the strategy.

“As we put more value into the products, we have people upgrading from Green to Gold, Gold to Platinum and Platinum to Centurion,” CEO Steve Squeri said.

So what could we see added? Well we already have a $120 Uber credit coming to the Amex Gold in 2021, and the airline fee credit going away at the end of 2021. Personally I think on the Gold it would be great to see a couple of centurion lounge passes per cardmember year. It would be great for gold card holders who are occasional travellers. And it also may persuade those who do travel more to upgrade to Platinum to get unlimited access.

In general I would love to see better redemption rates for Amex points through Amex travel. I have basically never redeemed my points this way because the value is just too low. 1c per point for flights and less than a cent for hotels. Maybe the platinum could go up to 1.5 cents and the gold to 1.25?

Then also what was interesting is he does mention enticing people to upgrade from Platinum to Centurion, which is interesting because Centurion is kind of supposed to be this closed group, but now they seem to want more cardmembers to accept invitations for it, or even register their interest through the website they set up last year.

Now he doesn’t mention the rumored new card above platinum and below centurion. But he may actually mean that, since obviously he can’t mention anything until they officially release info on the card. So he could just mean they want to get people upgrading and maybe we will see some info coming out in 2021. If they were going to release that card this year, they definitely have pushed it back because of everything that has happened this year.

I really hope all the craziness of this year can die down soon so that we can get back to travel and these cards focusing on what they do best, being travel credit cards. Guys leave your comments below on what you would like to see on these cards in 2021. I’ll put links to Gold and Platinum below, they are currently having awesome welcome bonuses of 60k points on the gold and 75k on the platinum so if you want to learn more about them check out those links and remember these cards will likely all have updates coming in 2021. As always please subscribe if you are new and we will see you next time. Bye bye.

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