American Express Smart Earn Credit Card Review

American Express Smart Earn Credit Card is an entry level credit card from Amex India. Amex is known for high customer service and is taken as a premium brand & with this basic card, you can start your Amex journey if your spends are not high.

Overview of the card

• Joining Fee – Rs 495 + GST
• Renewal Fee – Rs 495+GST (100% renewal fee waiver on Rs 40,000 annual spends)
• Regular Reward Rate* – 1 points per Rs 50 spent (excludes fuel, insurance & utility bills)
• Normal Value of 1 MR points  – Rs 0.25
• Accelerate reward rate – 10X / 5X partner + 2X Amex Multiplier
• Welcome Benefit – Rs 500 cashback on 10K spends in 90 days

*Amex pays rewards on wallet upload (one of the few cards that still pays rewards on wallet loads)

Eligibility

• You should be living in an Amex network city and your application address and your identity proof address should match. List of Amex network cities here
• Good credit score
• Income >4.5Lacs for salaried or >6Lacs for self employed

10X / 5X partner program for Accelerated rewards

• 10X rewards –  Flipkart / Amazon / Uber
• 5X rewards – Paytm Wallet / Swiggy / Myntra / Bookmyshow / Blinkit/ PVR / More / Reliance Fresh / DMart

For the complete list of 10X/5X brands & their offline stores, you can visit this link – merchantlist.pdf (americanexpress.com)

The accelerated rewards are great but the spoilsport is the monthly capping.

Merchant	Rewards	Reward Rate	Max. Cap / month
Amazon & Flipkart	10X	5%	500 points (on Rs 2500 spends)
Uber	10X	5%	500 points (on Rs 2500 spends)
Paytm Wallet, PVR etc	5X	2.5%	250 points (on Rs 2500 spends)

This means that by spending 7500 every month, you get 1250 points valuing

• 4.2% reward rate (1 MR point= Rs 0.25)
• 8.4% Reward rate (1 MR point = Rs 0.5 for Taj voucher)

Milestone Benefits

Spend Milestone	Reward
Rs 1.2 Lakhs	Rs 500 Amazon Voucher
Rs 1.8 Lakhs	Rs 500 Amazon Voucher
Rs 2.4 Lakhs	Rs 500 Amazon voucher

Redemption Options

There are many options for redeeming MR points.

• Statement cash or normal redemption on portal  – Rs 0.25
• You can convert to hotel loyalty points which can increase value significantly

But there is one more smart option. You can also combine these points with other Amex cards like Amex Gold and Amex MRCC cards where you can redeem these points at higher value ranging from Rs 0.39 to Rs 0.58 in 18K & 24K Gold Collection option for redeeming.

My take on this

The card is good for someone who wants to start with Amex and not much spending, say Rs 40-60K per year on these 5X/10X partners and get a decent reward rate and also get fee waiver.

The card could have been really great for reward rate perspective if the capping on the 5x/10x partners was not there. The milestone awards of 1.2L onwards are not really useful since if you have those spends, then you should aim for the other variants like MRCC, Gold etc and do incremental spends on them.

There are additional promotional offers and discounts from American express round the year which give discounts and additional reward points or vouchers etc helping get more benefits for bachat.

As I mentioned above, if you are eligible and do not have high spends, this could the right card for you to begin your Amex journey.

If you want to apply to this card (or any other Amex card) for the benefits, please use my referral link to join by clicking here: https://americanexpress.com/en-in/referral/tARUNBxmEu?CPID=999999544
You will get additional 2000 MR bonus points by applying through referral link.

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