u/Delicious_Tadpole238

Hello Everyone,

It's been a while...

I kind of got bullied off Reddit a few months back after making a series of posts on r/amex (nothing happened, just Redditors being mean as usual I guess), but I am back today with a small post because of something interesting I read recently.

A concern some people had was that I was talking about Amex as a current employee, but I wish to make it clear that I am bound and respect all measures related to any secrecy I must uphold.

With that being said, here the statement I heard:

"Amex caps you out at $35k in total exposure without any financial review."

I can confirm that this is not true in its raw sense. There are many factors that go into the credit limit increase process and our assessment of your eligibility for one.

Disclaimer:

I am an Amex Canada employee in the Credit Review Team and some of the following information may be slightly or completely different for Amex US, although we align on many things, some policies can be different because of the slight different in our credit score and report systems. We are usually a bit more strict than Amex US, however, so this should still apply.

What we care about when you ask for a CLI:

While I cannot share any detail on the raw metrics we use, I can discuss the actual considerations in a more broad scope.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of some considerations:

1. Credit limit request patterns
   • One thing we will look at is how often and how much you request. Our main consideration is to figure out if you are requesting credit for a good reason or not. Some people request limits just because, while others are in desperate need of extra credit and we only want to assess if increasing your limit would result in unnecessary liability. We do not care about more aggressive or passive increase patterns (in itself) and will gladly extend credit to you if we think you can handle it.
2. Number of cards with us
   • The number of credit cards you have with us can be considered. Although I may not give more detail than the simple: more cards is usually better.
3. Total exposure with us
   • This is the big one, we care about how much credit you already have from us. Of course, we have ways of assessing how much we can give you, but there is no magic number, or even really a strict number, it's usually a number we get from our internal system but we also have some leeway, especially if considering someone for a new card application.
4. Length of the card-membership
   • This one is pretty self explanatory. The more you bank with us, the more we trust you, the more we give you. Time only helps in this case.
5. Past and present standing
   • This is simply an assessment of your past behaviour with us (and current). If you have always had a perfect file with us, we usually are way more convinced in giving you a bigger line. This can be things like always being on time, never having any confirmed occurrences of things like cycling on purpose, or intentional misuse of the fraud report system. Some others signals can also help even if not bad standing per se, like paying in full, or things of that positive nature.
6. Stated income
   • This one is simple, we want to know if you can make use of that limit at all. And before you ask, we know people want to keep low utilization, and if you can prove you are responsible with it, we will allow a total exposure as a much bigger percentage of your income.
7. Current spend
   • Without a manual review, this is our best way of assessing your income, we make use of your spending habits to approximately tell if your stated income makes sense or not. If it doesn't then trust me, $35k+ credit limits are not required for us to make the decision of triggering a review.
8. Category of spend
   • This is something we use alongside your current spend to tell if you spend your money with us or not. For example, someone that doesn't buy groceries with us at all may be far more believable of making a higher income than someone with the same spend who is clearly spending all their income on our cards. However, this barely matters, and actually spending everything with us will always be better for our assessment as we will have a better global view of you (so don't try to game it, because we can tell). But it is a consideration to protect our members from annoying and pointless reviews in case they just don't spend too much with us (especially because Canada has a much more limited acceptance of Amex than the US).

So how about the $35k cap?

Well, we don't have such a rule. Each of our card-holders is am important member of the Amex community and we wish to treat them as such.

Do we have some math involved? Of course

Do we only care about that? No, not even close.

Each member is considered holistically (to a certain extent) and although we can't offer an unlimited credit line to everyone, we are always happy to offer, anyone that we consider able to handle it, a higher limit (even if it goes well above $35k). And this is why in most cases our limits are much higher than other banks (at least here in Canada).

An example to wrap this up:

I have asked Amex about allowing me to provide a direct example for a current card member and the credit limits she was allowed to attain. They accepted under the condition that all information had to be non-identifying. (I rounded all numbers to the closest $5k and blurred the card names.)

1. This card member applied early into her 18s and was declined membership as her file was unfortunately too new for us.
2. She reapplied a few months later for a card and was approved for a $15k starting limit.
3. She was then given an increase to over $30k limit in her first 6 months with us.
4. She was then approved (on her first try) for one of our premium cards early into her 19s with again an almost $15k limit.

To be clear, this card member has a perfect credit file (including with us) and a top 1% household income on top of always paying in full, but she was never asked to provide proof for her income in a formal sense above the usual income field on the application form.

I was only part of the review for her second card application, but as me and a few other people assessed, we had no doubt that this individual had and could pay off anything we extended to them. In this case, her total exposure with us is around $45k and at the moment we have no intention of asking for financial documentation.

Final Considerations

I am not sure if a lot of people have or have not experienced this, but I just wanted to clarify things for the people that were on the fence.

If you have any other questions that are (or not) related to this topic, feel free to ask me and I will do my best to respond.

As always, thank you all for choosing American Express. Whether you just got your first card or were a member since forever, we're glad to have you as part of the family.

Warm Regards,
C. F. Frost