A Learning Experience At A Premium Credit Card Provider Revisited

September 2025

Some of you might remember my post about a less-than-ideal customer experience with a data validation process that a premium credit card provider used at the time (let’s call it episode one). I didn't mention the name of the provider because I was hoping they'd improve the process over time.  A few weeks ago, the story started up again, but this time it was a whole different ball game.         

The premium credit card provider sent a letter asking the person who owns one of my partner cards to check the personal details. This time, the credit card provider used plain printer paper and—some might say—a somewhat worn-out printer. To be honest, that's the only thing I didn't like: The stationary I received in episode one was simply beautiful.    

Everything else was definitely explained better and worked more smoothly than I described in my blog post about episode one. Just so you know, the reason for the validation was explained in a nutshell; the partner cardholder was given a link behind the firewall that could be used to do the validation; and the link worked perfectly fine. And just like that, the validation was done.      

There were no situations that would reasonably be seen as phishing, no need to get in touch with poorly informed (some might say uninterested) call center staff, and no broken links to message boxes.    

I don't want to get my hopes up that my blog post was the reason for this big overhaul of the validation process: The process today isn't exactly the same, but it's pretty close to the best practices I listed at the end of the previous post. But someone at the credit card provider put some thought into designing and implementing a smooth new process. In my first post, I said I wouldn't mention the credit card provider's name because I hoped they'd spot the problems and sort them out. This seems to have happened.

Well done, American Express.