We’ve written before about Amex’s generous credit lines and how to go about getting a credit limit increase with them.
I never requested a credit limit increase on my Amex cards simply  because they were high enough for my purposes and I didn’t particularly need one. (Maybe add a little laziness in there as well.)
Recently, when making a purchase of $2,000 in gift cards at my local supermarket (to accrue extra gas points), I split the charge between two cards; $1400 on Amex Blue Cash which has grocery as a bonus category, and the balance on a Chase card to meet a minimum spend requirement.
Exactly 18 Â minutes after swiping my card, I received an email from Amex stating that they had raised my credit limit from $6600 to $9200.
Being that it happened eighteen minutes later, it appears to be an automated credit limit increase, triggered by the large purchase.
Any large charge could possibly trigger an automated increase (I’d also charged $500 at the grocery store the day before). But I wonder if the trigger was more based on the fact that the transaction at the grocery had been a split-tender and it wasn’t put entirely on the Amex card. (For some reason, in Amex for Target transaction history it shows up clearly when you do a split-tender transaction. From there I learned that the card issuers can see this.) Amex may have coded to detect such activity so as to keep more spend being put on Amex cards. If only they knew I was using the card just to take advantage of the category bonus…
Ultimately, I imagine that I could have gotten the increase by just requesting it – they wouldn’t have given it otherwise, but it’s interesting to see the thought-process of Amex in what triggered the increase.
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From my experience, this is demonstrably false. It may have just been a coincidence you got the increase then. Try it out on another of your cards. Split Transaction, Large Split Transaction (Amex-Amex and Amex-Non-Amex car),and a Large Transaction didn’t trigger CLI.
I’m sure there are other factors besides doing a split tender transaction. It is definitely possible though that you are right and it was a coincidence.
Hm. Charging a 500 GC at walmart triggered my Amex card to be rejected, a financial review, and them lowering my total credit limit on the card to about $500 over my balance even though I had successfully passed the review. This resulted in them crippling my utilization (went from 60 to like 95%).
Interesting. I would say split tender is more likely the trigger. I had couples $2k+ purchase but never have CLI until I requested them. CL was $7K+ now $20K+.
Could depend on a variety of factors. I hadn’t been using the card much before.