Update 10/16/19: A year after the initial announcement MR points can now be used at merchants accepting PayPal for 0.7¢ per point. More or less a useless redemption, fingers crossed we see some promotions to encourage this use like we do with Amazon.
Original post: American Express has partnered with Paypal to streamline the digital experience for Amex and Paypal customers. Upcoming initiatives, including my commentary:
- Use Membership Rewards points for purchases at millions of PayPal merchants online.
- The points redemption will likely be a useless redemption rate of like .6 cents per point, as it is with other Amex pay-with-points partnerships. Hopefully there’ll be some shop-with-points promos, like Amazon has, but I wouldn’t bet on that.
- Send money via Venmo or PayPal to friends and family directly from the Amex mobile app.
- Sending money directly in the app might be somewhat convenient, though a lot of people like using their bank or debit card to send money, thus saving themselves the fee. Not sure if that’ll be possible in the Amex app.
- Easily add American Express Cards to the PayPal wallet directly from the Amex mobile app or website.
- Sounds convenient. Wish Paypal didn’t have a limit of 9 cards per Paypal account which can be saved.
- Pay their American Express bill with their PayPal or Venmo balance via the PayPal Instant Transfer feature.
- Wow! I didn’t see this coming. Not very useful for me, personally, but I’m sure many eBay sellers and the like will find this useful. The catch (pointed out by a reader) is that this runs through Paypal Instant Transfer which has a fee of 1% (max $10). Some might find it useful for high payments and will swallow the $10 fee.
- More clearly identify their specific American Express Cards in the PayPal wallet with Card-specific branding.
- Nice! We all have this issue with Paypal and other merchants whereby two Amex cards both show up in your Paypal account as xxxx1000. This should remedy that problem.
PayPal and American Express will work together to implement all of these features over the course of 2019.
