One of the key focus areas for American Express in India has been to add more users to their credit card operations. To this effect, they had launched The Everyday Spend American Express Gold Credit Card last year. The USP of the card was 5X and 10X points on key daily use categories such as online shopping, cabs, groceries & movies.
Now, the product has gone through a thorough rebranding and also some changes in terms of product construct. First, the change of branding, the product, as of August 20, has been rebranded as the American Express SmartEarn Credit Card.
The American Express SmartEarn Credit Card has a very low bar for application, coming with a starting income proof for INR 4.5 lakh only.
On a typical day, on an average spend, you would get 1 Membership Rewards point for every INR 50 spent coming into your account. You get 10X Bonus Membership Rewards at Flipkart and Uber (earlier partner was Ola). That means every INR 50 spent at Flipkart and Uber gets you 10 Membership Rewards points. That is one of the highest numbers of Membership Rewards points earned for any category.
5X Membership Rewards that come at shopping, movie and events partners such as Amazon India, BookMyShow & PVR Cinemas. You also get 5X Membership Rewards at departmental stores such as Big Bazaar, DMart, More and Reliance Fresh, and even at shopping websites such as Myntra/ Jabong. This means every INR 50 you spend; you get 5 Membership Rewards points (= 5 Marriott Rewards Points for instance). Here is a complete list of 5X Partners.
Further, the cap has gone up, with 10X points cap on Flipkart and Uber now being 500 each instead of 500 combined as it was last year when we first wrote about the product. Lastly, 5X points are down to a cap of 250 points per month.
What do you think of the new American Express SmartEarn Credit Card?
This is the first time that the card has now been listed on the AmEx website as it was earlier only present on new application pages. Also since the income criteria is the same as Membership Rewards card with only the waiver criteria being higher (1.5L instead of 40k), it would still make sense to go for the Membership Rewards card with monthly 1000MR bonus for 4×1000/- as spends can be generalized(hint PayTM) instead of targeting 5/10x partners for optimization and it offers the accelerated Gold Rewards catalogue with nearly 0.5 INR per MR. This card seems to be more of an entry point into AmEx to target lower spend users into the fold. AmEx really needs to work on the low offline acceptance across non-premium merchants before it targets the masses and disappoints them.
They also seem to have removed the 1000 bonus MR on completing 6 transactions of INR 1000 each per calendar month.
Is the cap on 5X per merchant or is it grouped?
Overall this looks an interesting proposition.
Wasn’t that on the Gold Charge & not on this one ?
It still continues on the Gold Charge.
~Neo
I remember seeing it on the everyday spend card when I was comparison shopping between that and the gold MR cc in April this year.
No change in Gold charge 1000×6
250 points for 5x, across all merchants.