Amex announced today they’ll be selling off their prepaid card department completely, including their gift card department, to Incomm.
Lots of Visa and Mastercard gift cards run with Incomm distributing and dealing with customer service, and now Incomm will own Amex prepaid cards as well. The cards will still run on the American Express network and Amex will be the card issuer. Otherwise, it’ll be owned and managed by Incomm. The sale is expected to complete in the beginning of 2018.
What does this all mean? Probably that the Amex experiment to deal with lower income people was a flop. Interesting that they are selling off the gift card division too, which has been handled by Amex themselves for decades, as I understand.
On a practical level, the biggest question is whether we’ll all be ‘unbanned’ from Bluebird/Serve/REDbird after Incomm takes over. I don’t expect it to be all that exciting since Incomm might have their own issues with people loading and unloading at Walmart, but at least we can get back in the door and maybe use it sporadically.
At the end of theREDbird days, Target hard coded the registers not to allow debit cards to be used for loading REDbird, so you’ll want either Bluebird or Serve in it’s various flavors.
We’ll have to wait and see how this all pans out in 2018 when the sale concludes.
As far as Amex gift cards is concerned, I’ve had terrible experiences dealing with Incomm over bad gift cards, but others have had equally terrible experiences dealing with the Amex gift card department which is a completely separate, outsourced department. So the change to Incomm may not make it any worse.
