This review is about Amex Corporate Card, which has been provided by my company, and I have been using it for more than 1 year.
In my opinion, this card is meant only for those who use it with strict discipline i.e. pay the charges promptly, and in full. Yes, this is not a credit card - in fact most of Amex cards are "charge" cards, which most of the people fail to understand, and then crib about interest charges and late fees.
A charge card does not allow you any credit period(of 30 days to 50 days) which typically most credit card companies provide - here there is no credit period - not even for 1 day. The charge card is something like a prepaid mobile connection. If you fail to refill your prepaid calling card on the due date, you lose the ability to make outgoing calls.
What I want to explain is - in case of amex cards, the payment has to be settled in full exactly on the date of statement. Even if there is a delay by 1 day, or you make partial payments, you are charged heavy interest @ 3.5% per month along with late payment fees. So, if you hold an Amex card, please make sure that your payment reaches them on the date of statement generation. Please check your amex card statement online, don’t wait for statement to reach you. The statement will definitely reach you on time(mostly), but by then you will already find yourself in the loop of interest charges and late fees etc etc. Some banks such as ICICI(the ones with whom I have my salary account, I am sort of forced to, I can’t avoid it:-)) have the facility of making amex card payments online, but it takes 3-4 working days to be credited to amex. **So, please please please respect the dates, and make your payments before time.
Now, coming to the reward points. they are way too generous with reward points - that is what my personal view is about them. Every 40/- spent on this card gives 1 point, and not only this, they do generous rounding too. e.g. if you spend 380/- in a month, then the number of reward points you get is 380/40= 9.5 - **it will be counted as 10 reward points, and not 9 ! I have not heard of any other credit card company doing rounding upwards.
However, take that with a pinch of salt - to redeem anything, you need to accumulate at least 600 points - i.e. spend around 24000/- before you can get even a trivial reward! I have only 253 reward points till now, so no comments about the quality of their rewards as yet. Add to that - a fixed annual fees of 309/- to be eligible for reward points.
Their website - https://americanexpress.co.in/cs is highly unsecure. God knows which idiot has designed it! Even an average engineering student could have designed a more sensible and secure website. I had never expected a bank’s website to be so immature and stupid. You cannot have a username and/or password having more than 8 characters, and password should be only alphabets and digits, no special characters allowed! Readers from the software world can easily understand the security implications of this lapse.
What more, login to your account, and click on redemption of reward points. you shall be redirected out to some other page, without logging you out from your card account ! Click "Back" button 2 times, and lo - you are back to your card account! Infact, I find online banking sites of SBI and ICICI much more reliable and secure.
Acceptability of the card - This card had very limited acceptability at the time it was issued to me. But, gradually I have seen increase in acceptability of amex cards, specially in restaurants, big malls and airlines. Still, I would strongly recommend all frequent credit card users to always carry a MasterCard or Visa card, and not rely fully on Amex card. It is yet to gain widespread acceptability in India.
Customer care(phone banking) - Well, this is one area where I have been satisfied with them.(When you dial in to phone banking, you have to select between corporate card and personal card. I have dealt with them on numerous occasions, right from querying about annual fees to problems with logging into my account(forgetting password), updating of my contact details and my issues have been resolved in a professional way. Well, maybe I have been lucky, or probably they really have properly trained persons for corporate card section. I don’t know, and hence no comments about their service for the common man.
Mobile/email Alerts - This is one area where they are not working at all. For every credit card and bank account, you have the facility of registering for mobile and email alerts for some specific categories of transactions. But, not for amex corporate card - they do not have this feature at all!
Overall, not a bad card to have - in my opinion it is a no-nonsense no-frills card. But, because of their highly insecure website and no alerts services, I have marked "No" in the column "Product Recommendation". Amex still needs to work a lot on improving these aspects. Overall, it needs great deal of discipline with this card, specially in terms of making payments.