Amex Stops Automatically Pooling Membership Rewards Points On New Cards: Why?

American Express has just made an update to its Membership Rewards program, impacting how points can be pooled between accounts. Ultimately it’s not a big deal for those who are paying attention, though it is worth being aware of. I think the big question is what Amex’s motive is for this change…

Amex makes changes to how points are pooled

Amex has many cards earning Membership Rewards points. Historically, points have all been pooled in one central account, as long as your cards are all linked to the same log-in. As flagged by Doctor Of Credit, Amex has just released an update to the terms & conditions of the Membership Rewards program.

This says that when you open a new card earning Membership Rewards points, a new rewards account will be created, and if you have multiple accounts, you can choose to link them. This seems to only apply to new cards, and not to existing cards, at least for the time being.

Here are the relevant terms:

Effective immediately, the Program Terms and Conditions under the ‘Rewards Account Linking and Redemption Options’ section have been updated to the following:

Each Product enrolled in the Rewards Program is linked to a Rewards Account. When you open a new Product, a new Rewards Account will be created and linked to that Product.

If you have multiple Products with separate Rewards Accounts, you may choose to link some or all of your Products to the same Reward Account. Once your Products are linked to the same Rewards Account, points earned on each linked Product will be consolidated into a single points balance.

You can link your Products to the same Rewards Account by connecting your Rewards Accounts online or in the Amex App by logging in and navigating to the ‘Manage Connections’ option. Additional terms and conditions may apply when connecting your Rewards Accounts online.

You can also add or remove Products from a Rewards Account at any time by calling the number on the back of your Card.

What’s the logic of this Amex account linking change?

As long as you’re paying attention and go through the short process of linking accounts, this shouldn’t be an issue, or impact you negatively. However, I have to imagine there’s a reason Amex is making this change. After all, companies don’t typically make processes more complicated without there being a motive for doing so.

In fairness, Amex was probably the most “generous” card issuer up until now, in terms of automatically pooling all points into a single balance, without needing to do anything. Presumably most card issuers choose to not automatically pool points for two reasons:

• So that if a cardmember closes a card and forgets to consolidate points, they’ll forfeit the points they had on the account they closed
• So that card issuers can create different transfer ratios for different cards, as we’re increasingly seeing with Chase Ultimate Rewards and Citi ThankYou

Up until now, neither of those situations has applied to Amex, though under the new system, it absolutely could. I of course can’t say with certainty that this is the intention with these changes, but that would definitely be logical…

Bottom line

Amex Membership Rewards terms & conditions have been updated. According to these updates, new cards earning Membership Rewards points no longer automatically pool into your overall points balance, but instead, that needs to be done manually.

So you just have to remember to do that, which isn’t a huge deal. It’s not entirely clear what Amex’s motive here is, though I’d have to imagine the change is related to hoping people forfeit points when they close accounts, or possibly we’ll see the introduction of different transfer ratios on different cards? We’ll see…

What do you make of these Membership Rewards account linking changes?