Well, 2% on some things + 1% on everything else is better than I am getting with Amex now. Plus, $50k in free processing is like $1,450 in free money.
Honestly, I wouldn't believe that deal, except that I have a multi-year history with stripe as our CC processor and it has been nothing but positive and as-promised.
So, I submitted an application. It sounds like a great deal to me.
I push all our spending through a 2% cash back capitalone business visa. Can't find a better cashback rate, though you could run multiple cards through different vendors with their own credit cards, but you get diminishing returns. If you are a big amazon spender (products, not AWS), it makes sense to do an amazon visa, and then the capital one for everything else.
It's really easy to believe the deal when you look at your interchange rates. The Capital One that I mention above has 2.3% interchange rate, so the merchants who take it get hit much harder than other cards. Capital One, stripe, amex etc are all still making a killing on these cards, they just do it on the backs of the merchants who accept them.
Based off our business spending on our card, which isn't extreme by any measures (18 employees, bootstrapped and cash flow positive, doing fairly decent), it probably beats that stripe card even with the processing fee bump.
A warning for using the Amazon visa: their record retention is horrible. I had to call in and talk to someone for them to send me a paper statement for charges from the previous year when doing taxes. Their export for current records is also terrible last I checked. It's basically terrible for any sort of accounting.
As a small business owner, it wasted hours of my life for no good reason.
Probably the "Amazon.com Store Card" issued by Synchrony Bank, and not the "Amazon Prime Rewards Visa Signature Card"/"Amazon Rewards Visa Signature Card" issued by Chase. I've heard bad things about Synchrony's usability.
It was awkward to read this it sounds eerily similar to my company.
We’ve been using two capital one cards for all of our expenses (in the hundreds of thousands per month), and have really enjoyed the benefits of 2% cash back.
The biggest issue is the credit limit. Even after 12 months of making 4-6 payments for the entire credit limit throughout the month (we max the card out every week at least), they still won’t give us the limit we need. Sometimes they even make up bogus excuses on the credit request response form Such as “account cost too high” (or something like that)
> Even after 12 months of making 4-6 payments for the entire credit limit throughout the month (we max the card out every week at least), they still won’t give us the limit we need.
Had the same experience with the same card, asked multiple times for a credit increase ... which they denied. Then they increased it months later when I didn't ask. Go figure.
My personal card pulls the same shit constantly. Last raise request I made was for $300 to put a bill on it, was declined, a month later I get an automatic offer for a $1000 credit raise. They'll be losing my business pretty soon.
Wait, how do these cards work, then? The corporate cards I've used (eg AmEx Corporate) did indeed require a personal guarantee and a personal social security number from each individual who had an account.
That seems really odd. The employees who have these cards are often expected to spend multiple times their yearly salary on company business. Personal guarantees simply wouldn’t work.
The last place I was at did it that way. I imagine it was to incentive early expense reports, otherwise you were stuck paying the bill. Also protects the employer if the expense isn't legitimate. But, it was pretty stressful as an employee.
I have only had an Amex decades ago, but it was issued when I was too young to drink in the US. Maybe eighteen? Could have been nineteen. Something around that age. The company decided to send me to the US and somebody went "Oh, this kid should have a card so we can sort out expenses that way" and they ordered me an Amex. I never signed anything to my knowledge, just a corporate Amex arrived for me in internal mail.
In fact it wasn't even delivered until after I arrived in the US. At check-in (to the hotel, not the airport) my boss had fax'd them a picture of her Amex card and that was good enough for them. When she flew in a few days later I tried to meet her in the bar, and that's when I found out my first crazy thing about America - I wasn't allowed in the bar.
Very different times. But I'd be surprised if Amex now cares about exactly who the people are its corporate customers want cards for. Why would they? These cards aren't for you to use as personal payment cards, they're your employer's card and you're just authorised to use it for work.
>she flew in a few days later I tried to meet her in the bar, and that's when I found out my first crazy thing about America - I wasn't allowed in the bar.
It's usually based on receipts, and certain bars that are majority alcohol 21+, a restaurant that happens to serve drinks is any age. Pub type places really can vary depending on the state/county/city/township. But yeah exclusively alcohol bars will almost always be 21+.
I'm surprised this is surprising, I saw several 21 or even 25+ bars in Europe. But they were mostly aimed at turning away groups of rowdy backpackers, if you went in for a quiet pint nobody pressed if you were 22 or 20.
American Express has both "Business" and "Corporate Business Cards."
The "Business" ones require a personal guarantee. For some color, I've signed up for multiple Amex Business cards in the past as a "sole proprietor" even though I was really just churning the cards for the rewards. You just input your SSN for the EIN.
The Corporate Amex cards don't require a personal guarantee.
The AmEx card I used was 100% a Corporate card (not a Business card) and definitely did require a personal guarantee.
edit: After some searching, it appears AmEx offers corporate cards both with and without personal guarantees, and it's up to the company to decide which they want to do. In my case, at one of the largest consulting companies in the world, they required personal guarantees.
Yes, the employee. Why do you think it's shady? In my years of working in and around people with the same setup I've never heard of any complaints, and I know most of the other large consulting companies do it the same way.
AFAIK the thought behind it is that not every expense on the card is for work - as a consultant, I travel every week and I put all kinds of expenses on the card (not all of which are strictly "for work" or allowed to be reimbursed by the company). This way, my company still pays the bill for whatever expenses I mark as reimbursable, but the company doesn't have to worry about being on the hook for when I use my card to buy a pair of pants.
To me, it's basically the same as having a personal CC and my company reimburses me for the expenses - except in this case, it's a lot easier for my company to pay part of the bill directly (instead of me being an intermediary) and I also don't have to worry about hitting a credit limit.
The point is you're trusting the company to not screw you over and refuse to reimburse you or pay the bill, for whatever reason. Everyone has some horror story of waiting months to get reimbursed for something from an employer. It's less annoying if it's very occasional or the amount is small, but when you're racking up thousands a week there's a non-zero risk.
I suppose that's true and I would probably be worried about that if it was a smaller company or a company that had a real possibility of not being able to pay the bills. At my company that pulls in billions per year and has hundreds of thousands of employees that use this expense system that I've never heard one case of someone having an issue getting reimburses, it's not much of a worry to me.
We live in a post Lehman Brothers world...anything can happen. Personally would rather keep my personal expenses to my personal card and refuse a personal guarantee for any corporate spending, especially if it's going to average thousands a month.
Seriously, how hard can it be to bring both a personal and corporate card on a trip, and use each as appropriate? I've never had an employer issued cc but it's baffling to me that some employees have no problem personally guaranteeing company expenditures. I can imagine all sorts of scenarios, including a complete unexpected collapse, that would leave the employee out to dry.
>it's basically the same as having a personal CC and my company reimburses me for the expenses
The company collects all the rewards for the spend but you take on all of the risk of repayment. If you used your personal card you'd collect the rewards.
Using personal cards and being reimbursed is a nice perk for many.
Erm, no they don't. I personally collect all of the rewards from it. I have a nice fat account of AmEx MRs
(and plenty of hotel and airline points) thanks to all of my corporate card spend.
edit: I have no idea why this is being downvoted. Do you want me to show you a screenshot of my MR account as proof, or something? AmEx corporate cards absolutely give the card rewards to the employee, not the company.
My AMEX corporate card didn't allow me to earn rewards. I didn't know some did. It also had a personal guarantee.
From your link
>However, if your company has blocked the American Express Membership Rewards program, you will NOT be able to enroll your corporate cards.
Also
>To earn American Express Membership Rewards points, you have to pay $90 to enroll your American Express Green Corporate card or American Express Gold Corporate card.
So only worth it for people who know they will be big spenders and who won't leave the company for a long time. For someone who travels only once a year (like me) totally not worth it. I'd rather collect the ~$30 cash back on my 2.5% cash back card.
It isn't extremely common to do so, but the most basic example I can give is incidentals at a hotel. The hotel room and some incidentals are reimbursed by the company, but other incidentals are not (ie some consulting clients do not allow the reimbursement of alcohol). It's typically easier to just put it all on the corporate card and mark some of the transactions as reimbursable and some of them as personal than it is to finagle a way to settle the hotel bill with multiple credit cards.
There's also the one-off situation where I really needed a new pair of pants while traveling (my only clean pair of business-appropriate pants split down the middle) and for some reason the only card I had on me was my corporate card. Obviously extremely rare, but I've heard of similar situation (but with a belt) happening to another colleague.
I learned something! I had no idea Amex did a guarantee.
I routinely order multiple employee cards with nothing more than employee names. Sometimes they use last 4 digits or DOB to allow employee to authenticate for online access - you can use any 4 digits though you want (ie, employee ID works fine). No personal guarantee. Oddly, I'd never heard of a corporate card requiring an employee guarantee though I guess Amex is one of them.
This stripe card is a corporate card in the "normal" sense for me - no personal guarantee. This makes getting them (usually) very easy, just upload a list of 20 names and the cards come. I even do things like "Office Manager" for the name on non-stripe cards - works fine.
That is interesting. I've only used AmEx Corp cards with a personal guarantee and wasn't aware there was any other way.
For anyone else who stumbles across this comment: AmEx offers Corporate cards both with or without a personal guarantee, depending on what the company wants to do. And (also mentioned farther down in this thread) they also give the option to give the card rewards to each individual employee cardholder, or give all the rewards to the business, again depending on what the company chooses.
I could be wrong on this, and someone more knowledgeable feel free to correct, but the way I understand it is:
When you start a corporation with no history, any credit obtained is obtained through the founders personal credit history, with all the liability that entails.
When the corporation reaches a certain point of maturity, the corporation starts having it's own 'credit' and non-personally backed credit lines can be obtained.
I'm ignorant as to the variables used to determine 'maturity' (though processing volume and tax history are probably two, since I know you can get a corporate credit line backed by outstanding accounts receivable alone)
This is for a DE corporation and I'm a California resident.
The company I have experience with using personally-backed corporate cards has been around for a century, has hundreds of thousands of employees, and billions of yearly profits. While I'm sure that your comment is true, 'maturity' is definitely not the only deciding factor in personally-backed vs company-backed cards.
Yup, I've been in a similar (or the same?) situation. I think it's because when you get to a certain scale, it's the only way to force employees to file their expenses.
No approved expenses report, no payment, your own problem.
When I started in sales at IBM in 2004 this was the case. I had to put down a personal guarantee in order to be issued a corporate AMEX. I hated it, but it was a take it or forfeit the job deal.
From Stripe's corporate card page "All you need to sign up is a Stripe account—no paperwork or personal guarantee required. Get up and running with a virtual card in minutes."
As long as they don't renege later. Every single cash back card I have jumped on board with started with 2% ... changed the terms a year in to 1% ... then went down to 0.5% even later. And increased fees later as well. Maybe just bad luck on my part.
Canada has been capping interchange fees. 1.5% in 2015, 1.4% last year. They're the main way the card issuers pay for the rewards, so it makes sense that as they get limited the rewards go away.
> Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. agreed to cut Canadian credit-card transaction fees in a move that could save smaller businesses C$250 million ($192 million) a year and crimp revenue for Canadian lenders.
> American Express Co. agreed separately to support “objectives of greater fairness and transparency," the government said. AmEx doesn’t operate on an interchange model for its fees. The New York-based company remains “committed to improving the fairness of the Canadian credit card ecosystem,” company spokesman David Barnes said in an email.
As paranoid as it sounds, it's a bad idea to pin so much of your business to one vendor / service provider. If they decide to ban you, you aren't just locked out of payment processing but also the other services.
For the same reason, I wouldn't use Stripe Atlas (their company formation solution) or other services.
If you fly, ever, business gold AmEx cannot be beaten. 4x points on the first $150k spent on two categories of your choice. Then, 25% off(!) flights booked with points at AmExTravel.com.
I will definitely be getting the Stripe card because the intro offers are so good. But, the airfare discounts alone at AmEx Travel are so good it will continue to be my go-to corporate card.
I’ve had to use AMEX travel several times to book flights for business reasons, and it’s always substantially more expensive than I could get if I booked it myself. Even with 25% off I’m still not certain it’s a good deal.
Edit: just realized you were referring to booking with points. In that case it gets a little more hazy, who knows what the value is really worth there. But I definitely have a negative opinion of Amex travel and will avoid them if possible, at this point I just assume they’re giving me a bad deal
There’s literally no risk for them. It’s yet another vertical business that isn’t addicted to the fees and they know you’re going to continue to use them for payment processing so the CAC for a corporate customer at ~$1500 or so is dirt cheap for the LTV that they(you) provide.
Uber Visa gets you 4% on dining, 3% on hotels and airfare, 2% for online purchases, and 1% on everything else. It's not a corporate card, but it's hard to beat those rates.
That’s a pretty good rewards rate and there’s no annual fee. Reading up a bit, you don’t have to spend it as Uber fun bucks either. You can claim the rewards as cash.
The Uber card has almost nothing to do with Uber (the company) and their services, they are just the co-brand partner on the card. (So they get a kickback on card activities). I mean, you get a higher cash back rate from taking the flight than you do from the Uber ride to the airport.
Usually company cobranded cards (ex. airlines, hotels) are tightly tied with that company's services, Uber seemed to just want to make a good credit card that people would like to use often, which is unique.
However, it's a personal card, completely different market than corporate cards, so not comparable.
Not saying it is false or denying the actual premise of the OP. Just saying it feels personally to ME, very PR like and included for those reasons alone as a top comment here on HN.
Honestly, I wouldn't believe that deal, except that I have a multi-year history with stripe as our CC processor and it has been nothing but positive and as-promised.
So, I submitted an application. It sounds like a great deal to me.