Prepaid Debit Card Reviews, Complaints, Etc

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Where Can I Get an American Express Serve Card (You Can Apply @ WalMart)?

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Related Visa Card to Compare to AmEx Serve (like Serve but with less fees):

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Please Note! This article was published in 2013 and is being keep for historical purposes. Please click here for our current review of the American Express (AmEx) Serve Card.

In October of 2012 American Express and Walmart teamed up to launch Bluebird, a low-fee card meant to attract people unhappy with traditional checking and debit account fees. On April 21^st of this year, Walmart and AmEx announced that they were joining forces again, this time to make the American Express Serve prepaid card available for sale at 4,100 of the retailer’s stores nationwide. The card will cost $1.95 and be sold at checkout lines and in Walmart MoneyCenters.

This announcement instantly gives AmEx an attractive bragging point in the increasingly competitive prepaid debit card industry. By making Serve available at thousands of Walmart stores, AmEx has has created the largest free cash reload network in America. In addition to Walmart, it is now possible for Serve customers to add cash to their Serve accounts for no charge at 19,500 locations, including CVS pharmacies and 7-Eleven locations.

Customers can now go to the cash register at any of those locations and add as little as $20 or as much as $500 to their Serve accounts. This ubiquity is important, says Madeline Aufseeser, a senior analyst at Aite Group. “American Express Serve is making it even more convenient for consumers to add cash to their accounts so they can use those funds to quickly and easily manage their personal finances,” she says.

This expansion of Serve is just the latest effort by AmEx to better serve the millions of so-called “unbanked” or “underbanked” Americans, who either don’t have a traditional bank account or are unhappy with what they do have. “By offering American Express Serve alongside Bluebird at Walmart, we’re expanding our portfolio of products to meet the needs of more Walmart shoppers,” says Dan Schulman, group president of Enterprise Growth at American Express. “Bluebird is a great option for the “unhappily banked” who are looking for a true alternative to the fees and hidden charges often associated with debit and checking. With Serve, our full service reloadable prepaid account, we can now provide the nearly 70 million Americans who are unbanked or underbanked a simple and affordable way to move and manage their money.”

To go along with its expansion of the availability of Serve cards, AmEx is also launching an advertising campaign to highlight the benefits of its signature prepaid product. The TV ads are shot in a documentary style and are meant to highlight the struggles regular Americans who are either ignored or underserved by the traditional banking system face to make simple financial transactions.

April 22, 2019
AmEx and Walmart Double Savings Catcher Rewards

The rush to attract holiday shoppers and their dollars started before trick-or-treaters donned their costumes and headed out into the night. On Oct. 27, the checking account alternative card, Bluebird by American Express, announced the launch of a “Get 2X” promotion meant to entice Walmart shoppers with even bigger savings.

Here’s how the promotion works. Walmart customers can already take advantage of the company’s Savings Catcher tool, which allows shoppers to compare the price of items they intend to buy at Walmart with the advertised prices of other national retailers. If Walmart’s Savings Catcher identifies a lower price at a rival store, Walmart customers then receive the price difference on either a Walmart Reward eGift Card or in a Bluebird account. Customers can spend the money at a Walmart store or at Walmart.com.

The new promotion works the same way, although it gives double the benefits to Bluebird cardholders. To take advantage of the deal, which lasts through Feb. 28 of next year, customers can either go online to the Savings Catcher website or use the Walmart app and scan their Walmart receipt.

The Savings Catcher tool works as it normally does and searches for a lower advertised price offered by competitors. If it finds a better price, Bluebird cardholders can click on “Redeem to Bluebird,” which will automatically trigger a deposit of double the savings into their account.

The “Get 2X” promotion is a way to give Bluebird cardholders even more bang for their bucks, says Daniel Eckert, a senior vice president of Walmart Services. “Millions of customers are using Savings Catcher to ensure they are getting the best price on their everyday purchases. Now thanks to American Express, they can get even more back when using their Bluebird Card,” he says. “Bluebird is known for saving people money and now coupled with Savings Catcher, it’s going to put real money in customers’ pockets.”

November 20, 2014
AmEx Sees Surge In Prepaid Customers

Participants at last week’s Sanford Bernstein’s investor conference in New York City could be excused if they thought they had stumbled into a political rally. Giving the final formal presentation at the “Disruptive Trends in Financial Services” gathering, American Express Group President for Enterprise Growth, Dan Schulman, made an impassioned critique of the way the current financial system functions, or doesn’t, for the 50 percent of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck.

“There’s an epidemic of people being forced to the margins of our financial system,” Schulman said, citing statistics from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) that 70 million Americans are either unbanked or under banked, meaning they either lack a basic checking account or credit card. Tens of millions more, he said, are “unhappily” banked, forced to pay ever increasing fees for checking accounts that banks offered for free, in the past.

According to Schulman, this situation has forced far too many people to pay high fees and wait in long lines just to make basic financial transactions, like paying bills or cashing a check. Schulman gave the example of payday loans that aren’t immediately repaid incurring interest rates upwards of 500 percent. The belief that there is a fundamentally more equitable way to deliver financial services than what is currently offered by brick and mortar bank branches has led American Express to launch its low-cost Serve prepaid card and Bluebird checking account alternative. Schulman went so far as to say that it was a “defining mission” of American Express “to explode the paradigm that it’s expensive to be poor.”

If that is the mission at American Express, Schulman offered some pretty strong evidence that the company is making progress towards it. He told the conference that American Express has added almost 2.5 million new Bluebird and Serve customers since the beginning of the year. That brings the total number of customers to about 9.5 million. Additionally, Schulman reported that Serve and Bluebird customers have loaded about $1.9 billion into their accounts in the first four months of the year.

May 22, 2014
New BlueBird Prepaid Debit Card Now Offering Checks

Since American Express launched the BlueBird Prepaid Debit Card, it has offered a fabulous product for the unbanked. Starting out as a prepaid American Express debit card, it serves many of the same functions of an online checking account. Working in concert with WalMart, users can load deposits free of charge, make ATM withdrawals, use online billpay, track spending and set limits, all without the extra fees banks often charge.

Adding even more benefits to their product, BlueBirds now offer its users the ability to order physical checks right from their online account. Though the website shows fees associated with ordering physical check, checks are actually free until May 21^st. Shipping is also free. With this new move, American Express has effectively turned 4,000 WalMart stores into bank literal branches.

In some ways, the BlueBird is actually better than a traditional checking account without the extra fees piled on since the passage of Dodd Frank Financial Reform Bill. According to American Banker, “American Express (AXP) has just given its checking account alternative, BlueBird, more bank-like checking account features. It has added FDIC insurance, increased the amount of money a customer can place in an account and added physical checkbooks. The New York credit card company said Bluebird customers who can already deposit checks by snapping a picture from their smartphones, electronically pays billers and send cash to friends, can now place up to $100,000 in an account at any one time.” Funds received from BlueBird are moved to Wells Fargo within 24hrs, allowing the funds to be protected via FDIC insurance coverage.

For more information on the American Express BlueBird Prepaid Debit Card, visit www.bluebird.com.

For more from this author visit: Tameka Riley’s Author Page

April 12, 2013