Question About AmEx Financial Review

[Varsity_Lu]

I have a BCP with $12k limit. Requested an increase today and I put $25k down as my desired limit. They came back with, "we want to review your financials. Please upload 3 months of bank statements from your primary bank".  Anyone ever go through this with AmEx? Should I comply or just let it go? If I let it go and do nothing, will they ever give me a CLI down the road? My fears are twofold: one, they may determine I lied about my income (I didn't) and close my accounts and two, I don't want them snooping around my bank account.

[CreditCuriosity]

If you want the CLI upload it if you don't simply don't and nothing will happen.  Likely if you ask down the line they will still want to see them.  

[Anonymous]

You can also ask if they would accept another form of proof, e.g. pay slips, W2 etc, but quite often they refuse.   But so long as your account is still active (i.e. you can charge) this is just a proof of income (rather than financial review) so not providing it is "safe", just no CLI.  And, as @CreditCuriosity suggests, any future CLI request will probably be met with the same demand.

[GZG]

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@Varsity_Lu wrote:

I have a BCP with $12k limit. Requested an increase today and I put $25k down as my desired limit. They came back with, "we want to review your financials. Please upload 3 months of bank statements from your primary bank".  Anyone ever go through this with AmEx? Should I comply or just let it go? If I let it go and do nothing, will they ever give me a CLI down the road? My fears are two fold: one, they may determine I lied a about my income (I didn't) and close my accounts and two, I don't want them snooping around my bank account.

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this is income verification (IV) not a Financal Review, it's optional. If you don't provide it, the request will expire and you'll be declined for the CLI. won't cause any other harm than that. Consider asking for less in the future to lessen the chance of them asking for bank statements if you're unwilling to provide them.

You're already nearing $40k in total, if the spend doesn't seem to necessitate more, you might start hitting a wall, partciualrly at a lower income/less strong profile for getting more CL.

an actual financial review will shut off your cards and your accounts would be closed if you didn't provide what they were asking for, but this isn't that.

you can move limit from your HH card if you would prefer to have it on the BCP.

[Kforce]

All the above are on the money.

Just to slow these days.  

[Varsity_Lu]

Thanks everyone. Bear with a few more questions. Let's say I don't comply and the CLI requests gets denied. How long will it be before I can request again? 90 days? Also, if I request an additional $3k next time, that would bring me up to $15k on my BCP and $25k on my Hilton. Could I then ask for $5k to be moved from Hilton to BCP making each of them $20k? Maybe it the Adrian Monk coming out in me, but there is something satisfying about round, symmetrical numbers.

[FlaDude]

My experience with Amex is that you can move CL around between cards yourself online. I've been meaning to do that with my ED card. At 3k it is my only CL below 10k, and is only that way because at one point I was going to close it so I moved most of the CL to other cards. They ended up giving me a good retention offer so I kept it, but have just been lazy about moving the CL back.

[hdporter]

If your 3 mo statement income, after multiplying by 4, can document at least 40% of your stated annual gross income, I wouldn't hesitate to provide access.

For example, say you claimed $120k gross annual income.  I think you're fine provided you have monthly net salary deposits of $4k/mo ($4k x3 x 4 = $48k annual cash).  It can be inferred that bonus and other income make the difference between $48k and the expected net from $120k annually.

FWIW, I was unable to connect Amex to my accounts via the linking system.  So I had to download statements and upload files instead.  My increase was approved after a couple of days.

[Anonymous]

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@hdporter wrote:

If your 3 mo statement income, after multiplying by 4, can document at least 40% of your stated annual gross income, I wouldn't hesitate to provide access.

For example, say you claimed $120k gross annual income.  I think you're fine provided you have monthly net salary deposits of $4k/mo ($4k x3 x 4 = $48k annual cash).  It can be inferred that bonus and other income make the difference between $48k and the expected net from $120k annually.

FWIW, I was unable to connect Amex to my accounts via the linking system.  So I had to download statements and upload files instead.  My increase was approved after a couple of days.

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I don't know if this is OPs concern, but bank statements show other things than employment income, include outgoing payments and perhaps other income.   You may view that as TMI to give to a lender when it holds no value for determining with they should give an increase or not.

Amex may decide our ball, our game and refuse any alternative, but there are reasons not to give issuers more than they really need.

[Varsity_Lu]

@Anonymous 

I have nothing to hide, but you are correct LTL, there is the principle of privacy that I think we are all entitled to. The ironic thing is that a lot of the transactions in my bank account are payments to AmEx. They, of course, have the original transactions since I buy most of my stuff with BCP, so they already know what I spend my money on.

But still....