American Express co-branded Costco will transition over to Visa cards in mid-2016 and Amex is offering bonuses to try retaining those cardholders. The new Visa card will come automatically and the Amex Costco card will be closed. However, Amex is trying to retain Costco cardholders and transition them to a different credit card.
[Read: Our review of the new Citi personal & business Costco Visa cards]
There are a few questions being asked about doing such a transition:
- What bonus can I get a bonus for the new card?
- Will there be a hard pull for the new card?
- Will I retain my credit history?
Hard/Soft Pull – Soft
Many reports on Reddit (1, 2) indicate that accepting the product change offer from Costco to Blue Cash will not result in a hard pull. Note that this may be only for a phone offer and it may be worth calling in so as to ensure that you avoid a hard pull. It’s possible that accepting an offer via a different channel would yield different results. If you apply for a card as a new application, it will likely result in a hard pull; the key here seems to be to get the new card as part of a transition offer and not a regular application.
Signup Bonus – Up to $300
Amex is aggressively pursuing their Costco cardmembers to try to retain them in various ways. Some people got emails, some snail mail, some got offers over chat, some got offers in their login, and some even got a phone call from Amex with a special offer.
The offers are consistently for the Blue Cash Everyday card and the details vary widely or even change as time goes on. The best offer available is for a $300 after spending $2,500 within 3 months. That’s a nice offer on its own, and certainly for a card with no hard pull. Other common offers are either $100 or $200 after spending $1,000.
If you’re getting a subpar offer, try calling or chatting and see what you can get. Don’t settle for less than $200 as that one seems common enough, and it may be worth holding out for a while to see if you can even do better than $200. We still have some time to go.
All reports talk about a converting the Costco to a Blue Cash Everyday which leaves a big question as to what will happen for those who already have that card. You can try calling in to see if they can offer you the Everyday card or the Blue Cash Preferred card, although one person’s attempt at this did not work.
Credit History
Typically, when a product change is done, the credit history remains; even the account number often stays the same. In this case, it sounds like the Costco card will close down and getting the Blue Cash card will be a completely new product. This isn’t entirely certain, though.
It really doesn’t make a major difference if it’s a new account or not since the Costco card is being closed anyway and there isn’t anything you can do about that. The main difference would be if you can’t get any bonus for doing a product change (i.e. you already have Blue Cash Everyday), should you just shut down the account or do a product change without a bonus. At the moment, it sounds more like it will be a new card and it would seem to me that it’s not worth getting taking Amex up on a transition without a signup bonus.
The new Citi card issued by Visa will presumably be considered a new card on your credit history.
Update 2/3/16: Nerdwallet is reporting the reverse – the new Citi card will likely keep the same credit history as the old Costco card while the new Amex Blue Cash card (if you get one) will be a new card on your history.
Update 2/2/16: See the info given here by Amex.
Thanks to our friend on Reddit (here and here) for most of the info in this post, including the image
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