New American Express Business Gold Rewards Card Design – Will Other Changes Follow? (Our Sources Say No) [Update: New Card Name]

Reader patrickbarnes receive a letter offering a bonus for enrolling the business gold rewards card for extended payment options. Interestingly it refers to this card as ‘Open Gold Rewards 321’. If the name does change, I’d expect some change of benefits as well. The 321 is obviously reference to the fact the card earns 3x in one category of your choice (5 options), 2x in the other 4 categories and then 1x on all other purchases. We are checking with our sources again to see if there are any updates.

 

Original post: We’ve recently been posting a lot of information regarding rumored changes coming to the Premier Rewards Gold card. Readers have been asking if we will see similar changes on the business gold rewards card. None of our sources within American Express have heard of any changes to the Business Gold Rewards card (although that doesn’t mean none are coming), that being said reddit user puns4life found this card redesign:
    William Charles
  • On October 10, 2018, 20:24

View Comments (43)

  • Doctor, do you know if Amex is limiting their Amex offers to one card only (if offer shows on two cards)? I just got approved for the PGR and an offer for paying the phone bill (10% cashback) came up automatically but then when trying to to add the offer to this Gold card a message came up "Sorry about that! The offer you selected has already been added to one of your Cards."... Is this normal? I've never seen this. Anyway, just curious.

  • I am starting to appreciate these subtle techniques Amex marketing uses to launch cards. Leak a bit of info and let us rave in anticipation. $0 marketing budget.

  • I wish they'd improve their plum card as well. That has $250 annual fee but it seems like it's not worth getting because of the annual fee. Of course the plum card is a charge card but earns cash back, so definitely even more worthless than the BGR.

    • The Plum Card could actually be useful to real businesses because it let’s you float expenses for up to 90 days with no interest.

  • Would love to see a total revamp of this card ala the personal one. It’s practically useless considering the fee!

    • If you make use of the return/purchase protection benefits once per year, it pays for the annual fee. I also saved $150 this year via Amex offers - all on stuff I would have purchased anyway. With enforcement of 1 offer per person rule, that value is lowered a bit, but it still makes sense to hold on to at least 1 amex card.

    • The signup bonus would probably drop down if any of the benefits of the personal gold are matched to this business version? Anyone planning to sign up for the business now in anticipation?

  • Ugh, the 321 card? Amex has really been on a roll with their naming recently. Dunno if that's worse than "Cash Magnet" though.

      • Churn how??? Aren't you aware of Amex's "once-in-a-lifetime" (actually about 7ish years) limit on signup bonuses for each of their cards?

        • You simply use the same methods to bypass those terms as you do with all banks. I opened 3 this year and received the welcome bonus on all. Will repeat next year as well.

          • First, WHAT methods? No other bank has a "once-per-lifetime" limit that I know of, so you don't run into this problem at other banks.

            Second, things changed a lot a few months ago at Amex when they started giving even "light" Amex churners that popup that effectively says "we have determined that because of the way you opened/closed/used/did not use Amex cards in recent years, you are not eligible for the signup bonus on this card; do you want to continue anyway?". So something that worked in the past year at Amex may not work in the coming year.

          • Sure, every bank's rules are different. But many have some degree of anti-churning rules. And there's methods to bypass them whether it's citi, amex or chase. For amex, the main issue I run into is if you reapply for the same card within 90 days the app will be auto cancelled. Similar to MAC with citi. These can still be manually pushed through and approved. I experienced it last month getting the 100k personal plat twice in the same month. The second app had to be approved by manual submission to underwriting and I have now received the welcome bonus on both.

          • That doesn't explain how the person I was replying to, who already has the Gold card, but seemed to be planning to cancel it at 13ish months when the AF came due and THEN "churn" it, will ever get a signup bonus. Amex's official longer-term anti-churning rule is "no signup bonus for you if you already had this card in the past 7ish years" How in the world do you get around that if you've already had the card for over a year by that point?

            Meanwhile, Amex's more recent anti-churning rule is "no signup bonus for you if you've opened/closed what we feel are "too many" of our cards cards and/or used our cards only to get the signup bonuses. It doesn't replace that older rule, it's "layered" ON TOP OF it. And it eliminates the guessing, because if you're not going to get the signup bonus for this reason it gives you a popup that lets you cancel the app before a hard pull is done. I wish you luck,but I wouldn't be surprised if the tricks you've been pulling lead to you getting this popup on most future Amex applications. I got it without pulling any such tricks, simply because I cancelled two cards after having them only 13ish months and pretty much stopped using each of them after I got the signup bonus.

          • I don't know why you were so worked up about it. My original comment still stands. I am aware of Amex lifetime rule. I can self refer for 15k MR points, waive annual fee, and 3x. So yes I do plan to churn it.

          • Simple. Because even though reading all sorts of stuff about Amex applying over the years, including about each new "rule" as soon it came about, I NEVER heard (before reading the replies to my comment on this page) that you could get around "once in a lifetime" through self-referring.

            Why do you assume EVERYBODY who's posting here must know EVERYTHING that you do???

    • 75k mr points, 2x$100 airline credit, no af first year, are you talking about the same card we are?

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