iamfrugal

Does anyone know how many cards Canadians can have?I have 2 business ones.Those are the only ones that give a half decent sign up bonus.Comments?

troyb

I've had the following cards all at once:

Personal Gold
Business Gold
Personal Blue
Personal Starwood
Business Starwood
Personal Platinum (Authorized User only)
Corporate Green

I recently cancelled the Business Gold and applied for (and received) the Business Delta Platinum, albeit with a rather low credit line.

Vasco

I have a business Platinum Card, a personal Gold Card, and a personal Platinum Credit Card. And I keep getting offers to apply for the CostCo credit card and the Aeroplan Platinum card. My feeling is that Amex Canada doesn't really care as much.

Pizzaman

I have 2 personal and 1 business card right now. I am going through FR, but I was told "everyone who has a business card with a limit over $25K is getting FRed." I have two business associates who have limits over $25K that are both being FRed, but that's a pretty small sample size.

When I applied for the 3rd one about 6 months ago, I was told at that point they weren't allowing multiple accounts, and I already had more than they allowed with my two accounts. I asked for a supervisor. The person told me a supervisor would call me back, but that she would run my application again, even though she knew it wouldn't be accepted. Oddly enough, 30 minutes later I was approved.

TAHKUCT

Pizzaman,

I guess FR is in a near future of all Amex cardhoders. I have 2 business cards, however my lines are much smaller. My True Earnings card is only 11k and my SPG 3k (pretty much useless). So hopefully I will not be hit with FR in a near future, but with Amex you never know.

Keep us posted on a result of your FR and GL

zaf

I think it all depends on how much credit line the issuers are willing to give you whether they AmEx or any other bank .

Lets say the bank is willing to give you 50k a month as a credit line and you already have 4 cards with a total limit of 50k. They would prefer not to let you open another card because they will either reduce your limit on another card or will need to increase the credit line for you. Since they won't be willing give you more and they already gave 4 cards for that specific amount it doesn't make sense to give you another card.

I would presume that the higher your credit line is the more cards you can have by that issuer.

This is just my two cents, I could be wrong.

Okto

My employer has been using AMEX corporate cards for quite a while, but recently they decided that they were going to enforce that all business expenses be charged to the corp card, or else we would "face the consequences" of using our personal cards when on company business.

Not too long ago I read on FT that AMEX was limiting people to holding no more than 4 cards at the same time. An application for a fifth card could easily be denied.

So, a few questions:

1. Is the "no-more-than-four-cards" policy something AMEX has publicly made official?

2. Would applying for the corporate card through my employer count towards the "4 card max" limit?

3. Does anybody have any recent experience with getting a corporate card and suffering a hard pull on their credit report? (older threads on this seem to indicate that it's another one of those YMMV experiences).

Centurion

Does you employer give you a "true" or corporate card from Amex? Or are they using the small to medium size corp card? They are not the same corporate cards.

Okto

I think it's the "true" corporate card (i.e. it's not "OPEN" cards). The corporation has 10,000+ employees.

Thanks,

pannhead51

There is no official stated policy about how many cards a person can have. I have 5 personal and 2 business. The four card limit is just an educated guess.

skofarrell

There is no 4 card limit. If the corporate card is guaranteed by your company, you'll wont have your credit report pulled.

For personal cards, if they don't feel comfortable giving you another card, they'll make any reason up when they say "no".

Okto

As I understand it, the company guarantees the card if the employee fails to pay. After all it seems that corporate cards are personally guaranteed. In other words, in the event of non-payment, AMEX will come after the individual first, not the company, correct?

SectionChief

I have signing authority for my department [30000+ employees in corp] to approve Amex applications and etc and I get contacted if an employee applying for a corporate amex gets denied due to their personal credit rating not being "good" enough for amex to process without me/we signing a specific guarantee for that specific employee.

Also, I have had employees terminate without submitting expense reports for charges on their corporate cards and I know that Amex makes their lives a living h*ll without so much as Amex calling me/us to make amends [I know it happens because the former employees have been the ones to call for help in resolving]

With that said, in my experience, in my company, Amex corporate cards still have a personal responsibility to them and probably can count towards total credit extended from an Amex point of view.

skofarrell

Not having defaulted on Amex, I can't answer (and will defer to sectionchief).

I can tell you that with my three experiences with Amex corporate cards (large multi national firms), my credit report was not pulled and there was never a mention of the corporate card(s) with my dealings with Amex (on my personal or OPEN accounts).

S.Bling

I would tend to agree with sectionchief.

In my own experience, being the "gatekeeper" of the Amex corporate account in my corporation (not Open), I once submitted a routine batch of new cards to be issued to employees. All of the cards arrived in a couple of days, except for one.

That one missing request came (instead) with a letter from Amex saying that the individual in question has a blemish on their personal history with Amex and thus is being declined a corporate card.
A copy of the letter was also sent to the employee personally, with the opportunity for the employee to contact Amex directly and sort their record out.

I phoned my account manager at Amex to ask what the issue was with that employee, and was told that they could not discuss personal history with a third party, but that they would be unable to issue a card to that person.