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.
Has anyone been able to add a new payee to Bluebird Bill Pay since the relaunch last month?
Three weeks later, when I try to add the account number of a new Payee, I get the message “Invalid Field” and cannot complete it.
Just got email that new applications are not being accepted (by AMEX at least) after Jan 1st. This is what it said: “We are writing to notify you of a change coming to the American Express Serve® ONE VIPâ„¢ Program in 2018. As of January 1, 2018, we will no longer be accepting new ONE VIP Card Prepaid applications, but as a current ONE VIP Cardholder, we want to let you know that there will be no impact to your Serve Account.”
Hello Doc,
I just opened 2+ Serve accounts for each of my family members tonight. I realized that they’re not Chex inquiry sensitive at all because Santender declines my dad’s application but he’s approved for 2 serve accounts (regular serve and green card). Also there’s no more Chex questions so I’m not sure if that means something to some ppl.
I wish they would introduce a monthly fee or something in exchange for not getting shutdown. I’d gladly pay $5/month or something to avoid shutdowns.
Something like a Churners Monthly Maintenance Fee? 🙂
I don’t think I’d pay 5 bucks a month for it. I enjoy not having to go to WM for my MS routine — I get free samples at my local grocery when getting an MO, and then free premium coffee at my local CU when doing the deposit.
Also, up until now, isn’t it only allowed to hold one product at a time.
Either ONLY Bluebird, or ONLY Serve or ONLY a redcard?
Can we confirm this is still the case? (only one can be held at a time)
I have all three
The only reason restricting you to have more than 1 account could be Chex inquiry. I currently have BlueBird, regular Serve and VIP. Was previously able to apply 2 Serve accounts for family member, but was denied for the 3rd one. I guess that’s because of Chex inquiriy. You just cannot open too many in a short time.
That’s not ‘the only reason’ – Dizzle was thinking of how for years there was a rule specific to this family of AmEx prepaid cards that only allowed one per person across the whole family of cards, and your personal inquiry history had nothing to do with it. Apparently they loosened up on that rule a while ago after several years.
So wait, does this mean if I have the old prepaid Target redcard, that I can
continue to keep it AND possibly get a serve card and hold both at the same time? I originally had Serve but Amex shut it down when I loaded
AMEX cards to it to make min spend. Speaking of which, is that still allowed?
They changed the rule a while back and now allow each person to hold one of each card. That said, if you were shut down from one, you’re shut down from all.
I hope Incomm does not end the online debit card load feature when they acquire the family of Amex prepaid cards.
Is it possible to use a Visa or Mastercard Credit card to load Bluebird, instead of a debit card, using the debit card load feature? Or can the system automatically tell it’s a credit card and reject it?
They can tell and will block it. Same goes for anywhere you can reload.
You can only use an amex credit card to load the Serve version of the amex prepaid card. You usually do not get points by loading with amex issued amex cards. YMMV for third party issued amex credit cards.
I’ve got 5 Serves and just received my 3rd Bluebird. I guess it makes sense to get another 2 Bluebirds before the end of the year so I’ll be all set once the transition takes place.
What’s the purpose of 3 bluebirds? I know serve VIP, but for bb if u close one account doesn’t it close all theother ones? Also, there’s a $15k/mo limit combined spend and withdrawl. So having two BB gives you up to $10k/mo in deposits, but u can only withdrawl $5k of it then.
Right?
Multiple cards lets you abuse a couple of them then cancel the accounts, but then you have the ability to use the backup cards while waiting for replacements to arrive for the first two.
As far as the load / spend limit, I think it’s $15k spend in a month. I loaded both BB with $5k this month and withdrew all of it to my bank account a few days later ($10k in / $10k out)
This could explain why we haven’t had a round of shut downs on BB/Serve. They were probably wanting to keep as many accounts opened so it looks better on the books.
So true.