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@Froggee for my OH his new amex cards always gives much higher limits than he wants, so he lowers it to his acceptable limit subsequently. Better for credit profile.
We have reassigned amex credit limits between cards, just call which is easier than chat, as always ask for Brighton if possible.I have three Amex cards with a fairly high combined credit limit that I probably don’t need. Annoyingly the lowest limit of a meagre £8k is on my BAPP which was the most recent application. Sometimes that can be a squeeze but, on balance, it is manageable as any BA cash flights would most likely be booked as holidays.
So… would Amex pause for thought if I asked them to, say, reduce the limit on my AARC by £10k. I imagine a lower combined credit limit would make me being targeted by Amex for special treatment less likely.
But would asking to reduce a credit limit trigger any potential review?
@LadyLondon – what rule are you sure Amex has broken? If Amex were shown to have broken any rule, how would you suggest the party should frame any claim for greater compensation? The FOS starting position for any ‘distress and inconvenience’ payment if you haven’t suffered any actual financial detriment, is that you need to have suffered more than the standard annoyance and frustration that we all regularly experience. In that context, £200 is really quite rare.
The bottom line is that Amex can suspend the account of anyone they want without reason pending the cancellation two months later. It is basically an unfair action that circumvents the notice rules but unless you can demonstrate some actual financial detriment, you aren’t going to get anything for that unfairness.
JDB other people’a accounts (other separate cardholder accounts for which a different person is responsible – were suspended by Amex *without notice*. Those people had done nothing wrong. As Amex is now admitting. So Amex was required to give 2 months notice to those other, different people.
Remember @Metty was only a supp on those. This means it’s not Metty’s account, Metty is not responsible for that other person’s account in any way, and the other person, who is the accountholder, is responsible for the account as it’s theirs and they are respnsible for paying the bills. No supplementary cardholder can be pursued for matters on the account they are a supp on ss it’s not the supp’s account..
So Amex stopped the account of someone completely different just because that different person had Metty as a supplementary cardholder and that’s how Amex broke the finance provider rules.
If it was a joint account or possibly, at same address (ie “linked person” but that’s normally a joint household such as partners or husband and wife” then yes Amex can link them and take actions with the other linked person when only the main cardholder did something they don’t like or if Amex’s view of that main cardholder changed.
But for sure not for a different person holding their own account at a different address. Not even if they’re family. Not even if Metty is a supplementary cardholder. Remember Amex did not give those cardholders 60 days notice.
Given the draconian ness of Amex’s actions I d think opportunities need to be taken to make the way they’re acting visible to the FOS. The 750 reasons to do this for each family member Amex broke the rules stopping the accounts of when Amex decided it had an issue with this different person called Metty are not the main attractant.
The true need for the FOS to start seeing these cases is the gap in the law they reveal – any financial provider can just trump something up or even just claim they suspect something fraudulent eithout having to explain their actions or jusrify them to their customer nor to any independent authority. It’s a gap in the law that needs to be fixed snd tbis is a perfect case.
£50 is a derisory offer as Amex had broken the rule and should not have taken the without-notice acfion they did on a differnt person’s account as they have also now admitted. They deserve a referral to FOS for each person they did this to, not just for those people but the overall context of how they treated Metty. £200 perfectly respectable to respond with especially as here the cardholder is in the right: @ JDB have you never negotiated?
I’m still getting my head around the notion anyone putting “sex worker” on their bank account/cc application form! If there was ever an unregulated, unreliable and potentially dodgy (via tax avoidance and money laundering) source of income …
Surely you’d declare “therapist” or something similar?!*For clarity (and @JDB), I am not endorsing lying on an application form; there are plenty of occupations where the job title bears little relation to what the employee actually does!
@Froggee my OH with new amex cards gets much higher limits than he wants, he’s always lowered it subsequently. Better for credit profile.
We have re-assigned credit limits between amex cards, just call.@BBbetter – you’ve been asked to include Generation X in these comments also. I think it is grossly unfair to single out boomers.
Anyway – onto me. I’d be most interested in @JDB’s thoughts and indeed anyone else. I have three Amex cards with a fairly high combined credit limit that I probably don’t need. Annoyingly the lowest limit of a meagre £8k is on my BAPP which was the most recent application. Sometimes that can be a squeeze but, on balance, it is manageable as any BA cash flights would most likely be booked as holidays.
So… would Amex pause for thought if I asked them to, say, reduce the limit on my AARC by £10k. I imagine a lower combined credit limit would make me being targeted by Amex for special treatment less likely.
But would asking to reduce a credit limit trigger any potential review?
I also increasingly wonder about ditching my MBNA card. It has my second highest limit and I rarely use it but 0.5% cash back seems a silly thing to give up as they won’t hand it out ever again. It isn’t the 0% FX one which obviously would be a keeper.
But in a future world I can see me ditching the HSBC World Elite (it is free for me but I would not pay the annual fee if it stopped being free), Virgin will probably go at some point if I exhaust my Virgin points, who knows what will happen to the Hilton card, and then suddenly the MBNA would be missed!
@JDB as I argued I know what Amex did is legal. Yet it doesn’t feel right and the blow could have been softened. In today’s world, arguably, I am getting more and more convinced that a minimal amount of credit is also becoming a basic right, rather than throwing people to payday loans.
It’s also like no-fault evictions. It is currently legal to ask your tenant to vacate after the contract ends. Sure. But it contributed to the housing crisis.
@BBbetter surely Amex is taking advantage of the epistemic opaqueness they create. And sure, there can be a flag. It doesn’t entail account closure. It doesn’t have to.We need to accept it we are facing a typical AI based decision making that is blindly approved by execs. There needs to be transparency, accountability and fairness — like in any machine based decisions.
And sure, I’m speculating, too. And this case may not be an example of it.
My prediction is that we are getting closer and closer to that.
@can2 you have so eloquently expressed the issue here. Thank you.
One another thing:
It is very tiring for us consumers to maintain some random spending pattern that their algorithms figured out about us. The algo is opaque.
We are people, some times we may splurge or act cheap. We buy and sell things that may deviate from their mistaken pattern that they modelled after us.Use of pattern recognition algorithms used to be descriptive. Now there are normative. They are telling us how we should spend, or not spend.
I’m surely speculating obviously but the point is not if there is a flag.
The point is that the flag is wrong.
@can2 again you’ve nailed it. Poor quality of finance industry staff who aren’t competent and have let the machines run out of control with no appeal / audit process internal or external and not just Amex.
Welcome to ‘1984’. 40 years late arriving, but here now.
One another thing:
It is very tiring for us consumers to maintain some random spending pattern that their algorithms figured out about us. The algo is opaque.
We are people, some times we may splurge or act cheap. We buy and sell things that may deviate from their mistaken pattern that they modelled after us.Use of pattern recognition algorithms used to be descriptive. Now there are normative. They are telling us how we should spend, or not spend.
I’m surely speculating obviously but the point is not if there is a flag.
The point is that the flag is wrong.
@can2 again you’ve nailed it. Poor quality of finance industry staff who aren’t competent and have let the machines run out of control with no appeal / audit process internal or external and not just Amex.
Welcome to ‘1984’. 40 years late arriving, but here now.
Nailed it? Seriously? So someone goes from spending 2k a month to 25k in 2 months,a flag raised is “machines running out of control”?
These threads are never short of amusement.
“Amex has the worst products, people and controls”. In the next sentence, “How dare they refuse our entitlement to use their products?”Many people deviate from their own average: home remodelling, extra income, fancy travel etc.
Few years of financial data with an incompetent algo is not a proof that what was done was not okay.
I’m still getting my head around the notion anyone putting “sex worker” on their bank account/cc application form! If there was ever an unregulated, unreliable and potentially dodgy (via tax avoidance and money laundering) source of income …
Surely you’d declare “therapist” or something similar?!*For clarity (and @JDB), I am not endorsing lying on an application form; there are plenty of occupations where the job title bears little relation to what the employee actually does!
I think the point was cash based economy does not necessarily make it illegal.
@BBBetter the flag raising by machines / AI is great. It gives usefuk statistics and might spot something a human has missed, or didn’t have time to see, or that a human hasn’t been employed to see.
The iasue after that flag is raised is the lack of human review and particularly the lack of responsiblity for any fair appeals process inside, or outside the firm to a regulator or other independent body.
Let’s leave aside that the flag-raising algorithm Amex used here seems to have no factor that takes into account length of relatonship at least to a reasonable extent, as far as we can tell. ie something important omitted from the algorithm. If Amex had someone competent think about it and decided not to give any weight to someone’s long history in that algorithm and not after the flag was raised either, then that’s even worse and the only sensible thing would be to take everything you can (signups etc,) and then leave Amex.
Given I’m pretty sure what you do for a living @BBBetter, then I’m fairly sure you would know how silly just a flag is without these additional safeguards.
@can2, I didn’t say anything about legality, just how a financial institution would view this in terms of being a desirable customer!
I’m still getting my head around the notion anyone putting “sex worker” on their bank account/cc application form! If there was ever an unregulated, unreliable and potentially dodgy (via tax avoidance and money laundering) source of income …
Surely you’d declare “therapist” or something similar?!A long time ago someone took the Inland Revenue to court for “living off immoral earnngs” ie taxing prostitutes, when that was what prostitutes were being prosecuted for.The case failed and it was established that HMRC has the right to tax any earnings even if those earnings came from an immoral source.
*For clarity (and @JDB), I am not endorsing lying on an application form; there are plenty of occupations where the job title bears little relation to what the employee actually does!
I think the point was cash based economy does not necessarily make it illegal.
Should it? I really don’t understand the financial services area attitude to retirees. The rest of the universe says that retirees have never had it so good, reaping the benefits of being the first generation with significant private pensions, plus property equity, inheritances, etc, whilst also having tiny regular outgoings on mortgages, childcare, etc, compared to the next generation down. The vast majority of the ones that have Amex cards are likely to be financially literate and have significant liquid assets or access to funds, maybe from pensions, downsizing or selling rental properties or a business. Yet the financial services people sudden start treating people who have managed their finances perfectly well their whole lives – and about whom they have years and years of data confirming both wealth and financial responsibility – as if they were children, incapable of making decisions about whether they can afford something.
Assumptions. Generalisations. People love stereotypes.
Oh I am 60 and finally literate. So everyone over 60 must be financially literate.
Oh I am 60 and received an inheritance. So everyone above 60 must have received inheritance.
Oh I am 60 and earning from rental properties. So everyone above 60 must also be minting money from BTL.
And Amex must take responsibility to keep track of these inheritances or BTLs.Whereas you go to financial sections of newspapers. Boomers complaining of being scammed. Boomers campaigning for cash and refusing to learn or use cards or apps. Boomers who didn’t know they could switch broadband or mobile providers.
But no, all rules and guardrails must be off because they are above 60.If retirees are that desperate for a particular credit card and suffer from less predictable and more volatile assets / income, convert the volatile assets to annuities. Problem solved. Any financial services provider will be able to see your high regular predictable income.
But no, retirees don’t want that. How dare you tell us to buy annuities. Why can’t we have our cake and eat it too!
You must have missed that this thread is about Amex cardholders. Who by definition (given the income requirements for cardholders) are likely to be wealthier and have more financial nous than the average punter. And the thread is about Amex itself, who by turning away good business and alienating many other cardholders, is not behaving as its shareholders would no doubt wish in maximising profits. Sure, they can decide who they want to have their cards – and not have their cards – but they are shooting themselves in the foot if they don’t understand that the world has on the whole moved on from final salary pensions and annuities to more flexible options for retirees.
If you are not aware, MSE are looking to take the concerns of their forum users to industry bodies in the credit card industries. There is a thread in the Credit Card board of their forum.
If you think you have an issue, you could always post on the thread and see if the MSE staff will take it forward. I do not know whether you will get any feedback to your post.@BBbetter I didn’t go from £2k/mth to £25k in two months. Like many here, I’d usually spend to generate the Companion Voucher, so that was £10k between Aug and Oct. Then the Tier Points challenge appeared, so I got to £20842 by 21-Mar-24, an extra £10.8k. It’s not too different a spend profile.
Don’t many of us trigger the voucher and then move spend elsewhere? My spend has been close to £0 for 8 or 9 months a year then £10k for 3 or 4 months. Rinse and repeat every year for 21 years. Which could be another flag for the Amexorithm.
@JDB I didn’t say I was on a small pension. I’m not a £millionaire like some but I just got my P60 from pension income and it’s about 8% less than my salary when I retired 10 years ago. Spend profile is same-ish.@BBbetter I didn’t go from £2k/mth to £25k in two months. Like many here, I’d usually spend to generate the Companion Voucher, so that was £10k between Aug and Oct. Then the Tier Points challenge appeared, so I got to £20842 by 21-Mar-24, an extra £10.8k. It’s not too different a spend profile.
Don’t many of us trigger the voucher and then move spend elsewhere? My spend has been close to £0 for 8 or 9 months a year then £10k for 3 or 4 months. Rinse and repeat every year for 21 years. Which could be another flag for the Amexorithm.
@JDB I didn’t say I was on a small pension. I just got my P60 from pension income and it’s about 8% less than when I retired 10 years ago. Spend profile is same-ish and no mortgage now.
@HertsSam Thanks for the MSE suggestion but in our case MrsMetty feels that my over-sharing of personal info is bad enough already. She’s way more private than I am!I’m still getting my head around the notion anyone putting “sex worker” on their bank account/cc application form! If there was ever an unregulated, unreliable and potentially dodgy (via tax avoidance and money laundering) source of income …
Surely you’d declare “therapist” or something similar?!*For clarity (and @JDB), I am not endorsing lying on an application form; there are plenty of occupations where the job title bears little relation to what the employee actually does!
I once had to wear a badge saying “Performance Specialist” at a 2 day client event. It was a great conversation starter. In the end I took it off.
I just got my P60 from pension income and it’s about 8% less than when I retired 10 years ago
If you hear infrequent cries in the distance, don’t panic, that’s just another millennial who joined the workforce after ’08 reading your comment.
* jokes aside, you worked hard, you deserve it, it’s just … the bottom rung of that ladder us all sure does look nice.
Really sympathetic to @Metty cause, and hope you get an explanation at the very least.
But in the meantime am having an entertaining read between you @Lady London with your Performance Specialist badge, and you @NorthernLass with your concerns about sex worker on a card application. Tears of laughter rolling down my face with the imagined implications!
Joking aside, it is quite a thing, that your whole law abiding history can be cancelled with a stroke of an AI or robotic human pen??? Without explanation. Like @AJA, holding on to our BAPP, Bonvoys, and my recently obtained gold biz card. We are just around this annoying 35k each, and probably wouldn’t get a new BAPP if we let it go. The 15k spend is fine, as my OH knows it’s more than his life’s worth to even think about using his debit card. In fact, l have removed it now, as mistakes have been made! He does have a supp on my WE, which is also ok.
I guess “Performance Specialist” might be an option on an application 🤷♀️😂.
Glad it’s not just me who’s had to threaten to confiscate offending plastic, @polly 🤣I really don’t understand the financial services area attitude to retirees.
You’re not alone, but the law allows financial services companies a limited exemption from the Equality Act for good reason.
The problem with pensioners is not that they’re bad, but that they’re different. Risk models calibrated for working people may perform badly on pensioners and vice versa. Some of the more obvious issues are: the purchasing power retirement income tends to decline over time, while employment income tends to rise; household expenditure patterns are very different (no commuting, no mortgage, more travel, heating used 24×7, for example); pensioners usually draw down investment principal while employees accumulate investments; and, for older pensioners, mortality risk sadly starts to become material.
That why you often find age rules on products – although these are not always made explicit, they’re normally present behind the scenes.
And meanwhile my 80 year old mother recently upgraded the BA Amex to the BAPP having downgraded after earning her prior 241 voucher.
The mysterious algorithms.
The problem with pensioners is not that they’re bad, but that they’re different.
All protected characteristics are “different” and will present a difference to modelling on spend, etc. That’s not a reason to deny people access to products IMHO.
I was with a company last week (and again later this week) who are looking for AI to help them avoid human-induced (accidental or otherwise) discrimination in the provision of services. This is what we should be encouraging, not making excuses for inadequate algos.
If retirees are that desperate for a particular credit card and suffer from less predictable and more volatile assets / income, convert the volatile assets to annuities. Problem solved. Any financial services provider will be able to see your high regular predictable income.
But no, retirees don’t want that. How dare you tell us to buy annuities. Why can’t we have our cake and eat it too!
I think this is a bit rich and antideluvian thinking on your part. The Pensions Freedom legislation was introduced in April 2015 (9 years ago, more than enough time to become commonplace) to specifically allow pensioners to flexibly access the money saved in their DC pension plan.
There is absolutely no legal requirement that says the only way you can access DC pension funds is via an annuity. In fact forcing anyone to do this would be illegal.
So while that may be what annuity providers and credit card companies would like that is wishful thinking on their part.
You seem to be suggesting that credit card companies can stick with outdated methods of risk analysis because it suits them. And if we pensioners want a credit card we have to accept their outdated rules. No thanks!
It should be that credit card companies adopt 21c attitudes to pension access and modify their risk algorithms accordingly. That is their problem, not ours.
All protected characteristics are “different” and will present a difference to modelling on spend, etc. That’s not a reason to deny people access to products IMHO.
The financial services age exemption came after extensive consultation with both industry and consumer groups. Some things obviously bothered the industry; for example, if it were illegal to include age as a factor in pricing life assurance, annuities or health insurance, those products would immediately disappear from the market. Other things bothered consumer groups: should a 55-year-old be offered a 30 year mortgage, for example? Many lenders would be happy with the credit risk, but it could lead to homelessness amongst vulnerable retirees.
You might have a philosophical perspective that you should be free to make a bad decision that could throw you onto the streets in your eighth decade, but, for better or worse, we live in a country where governments and consumer lobby groups have determined that you need to be protected from yourself. So, whether you like it or not, people in the UK will be denied access to products based on their age or retirement status for the foreseeable future.
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