JMo74

I have a range of Amex cards including Business Platinum, Business Gold, Blue Business and Amazon Business Prime. I also have Schwab Plat personal card. Bulk of my spend is on the business cards, my Schwab Platinum is $350,000 so far for this year but I don't know if they look at that or strictly business card spending. I moved my business spending over to Amex from Chase Ink in late 2019, my total spend for that year was only slightly over $100.000. In 2020, my business card spending was $2.2 million. For this year I am at $2.1 million currently and anticipate end of year will be close to $2.4 million.

A year ago I was assigned a business rep from Amex. He never was much of a help, mainly just pitched other products they have. He did tell me to get Business Centurion I would have to spend $10 million per year combined on all my cards. I'm obviously nowhere near that which is why I was so surprised by the invitation today.

GrnLantern

Thank you. This is super helpful.

Yeah, I heard the $10M/year magic number before. I think it's just their default answer because most people I know who received Biz Cent invites over the past 1-2 years were well below that.

I get the sense that for Biz Cent they only look at spend on their Business cards (so Schwab Platinum won't count).

Visconti

Ah, unless we’re talking about Billionaires, we’re just all regular folks, more or less. So, if we were just two guys having a drink sharing stories of our hobby, the only difference is that because I maybe having a better year, I’ll fight a little harder for the check.

While only speaking for myself, all the Centurion cardmembers I’ve had to good fortune to meet have all struck me as very normal, polite and generally good natured folks.

714

Out of curiosity, how does your business spend US$10M a year? What type of spending are they?

It seems to me that many of the members here are capable of spending this insanely huge amount!

WasKnown

Can you share what the spend profile looked like? Broadly speaking, what types of things did you buy? It sounds like you only spent at this level for about 2 years

GUWonder

Billionaires are regular folks too, with some actually behaving in ways that don’t make it obvious to most others. Some not even willing to spend money for the card fee. Can’t say the same thing for some people who wanted a Centurion invite but asked some of my relatives if they could be made additional card users on the accounts and even offered to pay for the fee to get AU Centurion cards but are nowhere close to being comfortably wealthy for life absent maybe an inheritance windfall at some point.

Speaking of which, do people with AU cards on Centurion accounts have any better chance of getting a Centurion account of their own just because they are an AU Centurion card holder?

Visconti

I suspect Amex is a very different company now, but I’m old enough to recall a time when they seemed to acknowledge one’s Member Since date and legacy cardmembers. For the longest time, cardmember AUs were bequeathed the Basic cardmember’s opening tradeline date, and had been standard practice until some made a big fuss over it and the influx of those credit repair outfits where some 20+ cardmembers would charge a fee for AUs.

Back then, when I used to call Amex much more than I do now, it wasn’t uncommon where the CSRs mentioned the Member Since date whenever receiving a call. So, if I had to guess, yes? Of course, it would only be something very minor where it may tip the scale in a tie breaker scenario.

Of course, the above is purely my individual experience, anecdotal and pure speculation.

SteveT

Media buys. There are marketing/advertising companies that purchase media buys on behalf of their clients. Also, a lot of retailers purchase media buys. Media buys are FB/IG, Google, Amazon ad buys.

samasa221

My husband received the US Centurion invitation on Monday yesterday. It's been years since we joined the forum and this particular thread helped us alot with insights of Centurion etc.
So I think its time to contribute here based on our own experience.

Background:
We are purely based in London, UK. My husband had the first UK Amex Plat since 2008.
Our UK spending are around £6-10 million per year from 2015, 70% on business plat, 30% on personal plat.
My husband made a global transfer from UK to US back in early 2017 for the US personal plat. Since the card was opened, he made 0 spending on the US plat. Yes, we missed the card opening bonus because my husband literally just wanted a US plat for backup use when he traveled to US (UK amex has 3% FTF). I didn't ask why he didn't make any purchase by using the US plat.
By mid of 2020, we spoke to UK centurion team and tried to see if they could possibly offer an invitation, but failed. So my husband decided to move some of our personal spending to his US plat and see if he could secure an invitation.
He applied to get Gold, Green, Marriott, 3 Hilton cards within 6 months from June 2020 as he planned to close all UK amex personal cards once the US amex portfolio is ready. By then he spent minimal on all those US cards just to get the opening bonus.
We actually started to use the US personal plat since March 2021. We had the spending amount as per below.
Plat: $1.2 mil
Gold: $500k
Marriott: $150k
We don't spend anything on the other cards. These are all personal spending. Mainly luxury shoppings and high end restaurants etc. We didn't move biz spend over to the US cards yet.
We had been thru 2 FRs since March this year and my husband was quite familiar with the process coz we already had countless FRs in UK since 2015.
I would say our point & mile portolio is good. My husband have 6 million membership rewards in the UK account. 13 million Marriott Bonvoy points, 3 million Hilton Honours points and 2.5 million avios in the household account.
Because we have a nice points portfolio, we had minimal luxury travel spends on our Amex cards. We used points & miles to redeem our travel 100% of time.

Just to give you a rough idea how my husband got the Cent invitation less than a year which really surprised me tbh, compared to our 5 years' spending history with UK amex.
I think there is one thing worth pointing out. In mid of September this year, we called up Plat helpline to see if they can try to arrange the invitaton (you don't try you never know). The lady on the phone was very nice chatting and she said she can put my husband through to the Centurion team. Then he waited for 20 mins and was passed through to the Centurion customer service. Another lady on the phone said he had gone through my husband's profile and she thinks its good for a review. She told us she would send over to the Cent review team and would definitely have a call back to us from the team within 2 weeks. My husband asked twice, if he was not qualified for the Cent review, will he still receive callback? The lady said yes, they will definitely call us no matter the outcome. I was abit surprised coz normally there shouldn't any callback if the invitation is not secured.
And yesterday afternoon my husband received a call from Cent team to be offered the black card. The process took about 30 mins for t&c etc. We can see the package is on the way to our US home now.
Also, in the past 6 months my husband registered his interest on the centurion.com quite a few times as per those bloggers mentioned on the internet, we both don't think it helps. I think its better to call up the cent helpline and try to request a review if you are confident with your spending.
Regarding the postcode/area, we don't think it matters. Our US address is near Seal Beach, Los Angeles, but all our spending is in Central London and Europe when travelling. We had 0 spend in US since we had those cards.

I hope our experience to secure the invitation can give a bit of help here and thank you so much for the insights all these years.
No matter we are just lucky or not, I would say this thread is most useful on the internet with regard to Amex centurion card.
Thank you everyone.

moe8555

Wow, thanks for that beautifully detailed and informative post! I think you contributed some very interesting and novel data points, especially with regard to the fact that there was 0 U.S. spend.

I'm surprised the UK team didn't offer an invite, as my impression was that the thresholds are lower in UK/Europe, and net spend plays a larger role vs. quality of spend.

GUWonder

My impression is that the consideration thresholds have not been static in Europe and have not been static in the US — and “not static” as with an easing in the qualification criteria since the big fee hike. Amex wants that Centurion fee revenue too — more than before.

samasa221

We are also very confused in what reasons after all these years we still haven't received an invite given that we had spent well over £40 million across all our UK amex card products. From my understanding this level of spending should be quite significant enuff as per other posts mentioned here. So I felt like UK Cent is very difficult to get among all other countries. We just don't quite get the logic behind it.
We have a very good relationship manager serving our UK Business Plat and every xmas we mentioned if we could possiblely receive the invite, but he always told us he could try but can't guarantee. Instead he offered some nice xmas gifts to us as a good gesture for the spending in that year.

Also UK doesn't have Business Centurion version so no matter our spending is either personal or biz, there should be at least a personal Centurion invite somehow I believe.

There is a rumor that in the past few years UK doesn't send out any cent invitation and that might be the main reason alot of high spenders don't receive invites.

But anyway we feel like US Cent is best especially that it doesn't have FTF and we can use it anywhere we want, unlike UK cent which still has 3% FTF.

JMo74

Spending profile on my business cards was very general, nothing that I think would stand out and attract the attention of Amex. Mainly inventory. Now what is interesting to me is when I did my app on the phone with Amex they told me it was my Schwab card that triggered the invite. That card has much more luxury spend on it. Rolex, Louis Vuitton, first class international airfare etc. But Schwab is a personal platinum card and my Centurion card is a Business Centurion.

YClass

Shift spend to a personal Plat/Amex and don't buy bulk inventory and I'm sure you'll get one quickly on those numbers. If every bigger spender on Business/Corporate cards was included there would be 10x Cents in the UK.

NotSoMuch

Congrats on the approval!

From what I read and a few friends with US version, I still think the US Centurion is the hardest to get at least for personal version. My guess is US>JP/UK>AU/CA/HK/SG/NZ>Europe>Everywhere else. The US business version and the ICC/IDC can't really be compared with different personal version as both had different routes to qualification.