Amex Serve Loads No Longer Counting for Minimum Spend?

All versions of the Serve cards offer the ability to  be loaded with $1,000 in credit card loads online, which can then be used to do things like pay credit cards bills or even withdraw the money to your bank account. See Six Different Flavor of Serve and How to Remain Fee-Free.

The big limitation here is that you can only load your Serve account with an Amex card and Amex cards don’t earn points for Serve loads. No gain in doing that.

One value some people got from their Serve credit card loads was to use this as a way of meeting minimum spend requirements on a new Amex credit card. While Serve loads don’t earn points, they’ve always worked in the past to count toward minimum spend required for a signup bonus.

This may have changed.

Two recent data points on Flyertalk (1, 2) indicate that Serve loads may no longer be working to count toward a minimum spend threshold.

Other ways to get value from Serve loads

• Use a third party Amex card, such as Fia Amex or Flexperks Amex, and you’ll get points for the credit card loads. As an example, if you load with Fia you’ll earn $20 per month (2% of $1,000), or $240 per year.
• If you have the grandfathered SoftServe version of Serve, you can still load your card with any point-earning credit card, up to $1,500 per month. Just be careful to avoid any potential cash advance issue (see this Flyertalk wiki).

UPDATE

UPDATE: One Reddit member also tells a similar story of Serve online loads not working to trigger the signup bonus, but many others in that Reddit thread offer recent data points to the effect that it is still working for minimum spend.

In any case, it’s probably not smart to rely only on Serve loads; you won’t be able to fight it with Amex if there is a problem. At the very least, be sure to finish the spend early so that if the bonus doesn’t post automatically, you have time to complete the spend some other way.