Nearly all banks give their front office employees a green American Express Business card. While this card is pure peasantry compared to the big boy Amex cards, its a valuable foot in the door for junior employees. The amount of money flowing through your group is more than enough to get you on Amex’s good side, qualify for better cards and make banking life suck a little less.
When you get your green Business Amex, set up your account online and call the customer service number on the back. Ask the customer service rep if you can link your corporate Amex to a personal Amex account and accrue the points there. If the answer is “yes,” you are golden. Most large firms still allow this but most employees don’t know this is an option. After a few months of steady spending on your corporate card, it is time to start applying for the big boy cards. I was conservatively putting $30,000 through my corporate card annually which made getting approved for the Platinum and Gold cards relatively easy. To get the best welcome offers, apply for the Platinum card first, spend the minimum to get the welcome reward and then repeat the process with the Gold card. Typical welcome offers for the Platinum card range from 80,000 to 125,000 membership rewards (“MR”) points while the welcome offer for the Gold card is almost always 60,000 no matter what. If you go Gold first then Platinum, the welcome offer for Platinum starts to dip below 80,000.
Now that you have your Amex cards set up, you need to enroll in all the benefits, most of which come with the Platinum Card. There are better sites to get the nitty gritty details on all the benefits but I will touch on the ones that help junior bankers the most.
TSA Pre Check and Clear Plus Credit: Combo allows you to skip all the plebians in the regular security line, keep your laptop in your bag and shoes on while going through security
Hertz Presidential Circle: Given my coverage group, my business travels took me to more suburban/rural areas where Uber was not reliable so renting a car was typical and as the most junior person, I was responsible for driving. Hertz Presidential Circle allows you to avoid the regular counter line and pick any car (usually with an upgrade to something like a Suburban too)
Marriott Bonvoy & Hilton Honors: I have not used Hilton hotels as much but both function in the same way. On top of all the regular perks like free WifFi and room upgrades, Bonvoy counts your corporate stays towards your status allowing you to earn free nights for personal use.
Centurion Lounge Access (No Enrollment Required): Huge for business travel as it will give you a quite, comfortable spot to keep working while waiting for your flight. The food and drinks are also free but I would not recommend getting drunk for a work flight.
Resy Global Access: Again, as the most junior person, finding and booking restaurant reservations will likely fall to you. With Resy Global Access you will get some preference for hard-to-book spots. Goes without saying that this benefits your personal life too when you can secure a Don Angie res for a date.
Equinox Statement Credit: You should be paying for this already but the $300 annual statement credit is nice to have as well. If you do find yourself traveling to other large cities, its nice to go to a real gym and get a nice shower before/after travel
There are a bunch of other benefits to enroll in like airline incidentals, hotel, Uber, GrubHub and entertainment credits but these should be saved for personal use as your firm likely pays for this stuff already.
Now lets see what the MR points look like under two scenarios; conservative and aggressive. The conservative scenario assumes you have to use your corporate card for all work-related transactions. You’ll notice here that you are really only using your corporate and Gold cards for transactions and just using the Platinum card for the benefits.
Under conservative assumptions, you can see the Amex stack pays for itself before you factor in all the additional benefits making it a no brainer. In the aggressive scenario, it assumes you can use personal cards for corporate transactions and expense them to your company. I was at a boutique bank where the admin resources were concentrated with MDs giving me the freedom/burden to handle most of my logistics. This gets a little risky because 1) you need to manage the “float” between paying your personal credit card bill and when you get reimbursed for expenses and 2) you need to be incredibly organized to keep all the relevant receipts and expense things in a timely manner. If you can manage that, the rewards are much better.
This equates to a net benefit of ~$1,200 a year before any welcome offer points, statement credits, free hotel nights, seat upgrades etc. I also ran this analysis from 2021 when travel and in-person meetings, lunches and dinners were all limited so you can see it is well worth it.
Use the Amex benefits to cover a round trip ticket to Europe, get a few free nights in a nice hotel and invest your bonus elsewhere. Also, highly recommend renting a convertible muscle car and driving Highway 1 in California at some point in your life. Hope this helps and happy hunting.
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