Summary – The The Plum Card(R) from American Express OPEN is the official business credit card for AskMrCreditCard.com and in our opinion, one of the most innovative business card around. Let’s find out more.

Card Details – Here is American Express’ Marketing Statement for the Plum Card:

Meet the American Express OPEN(R) Charge Card that offers trade terms on virtually everything you purchase. The Plum Card.

• Pay in full within ten days, get a 1.5% discount.
• OR pay as little as 10% and take up to 2 months to pay off the balance, interest free.

See how your business can benefit from everything, everywhere trade terms. The opportunity for using trade terms is the reason many businesses continue to use cash. But now your business can receive trade terms on purchases virtually everywhere the Plum Card is accepted. So pay early to receive a discount or defer payment ??? it’s your choice.

Open Savings – Like all Amex Business Cards, you can get discounts at OPENSAVINGs merchants.

Verdict – This card is unique among business credit cards in that it functions more like a trade line. Typically, a business owner might have a business credit card with a line of say $50,000. This will be considered by most as a line of credit. If the business owner chooses to carry a balance, he or she will have a float for about 20 days (standard grace period) and they will be charged an interest (the APR) if they do not pay their balance in full on the billing date. The The Plum Card® from American Express OPEN instead allows you to defer paying your balance for longer than the usual 20 day grace period. This looks more like a “proper” line of credit.

If the business owner pays in full, they will earn cash rebates for that month, which is higher than most business cash back credit cards and there is no cap on how much rebates you can earn (note: many business cards now cap the rebates you can earn on things like gasoline etc).

So is the annual fee worth it. Well, this is how I would look at this card. For those who pay in full, this is a great card because you get cash rebates on your purchases. I view the annual fee as a very cheap option to get interest free finance for more than a month if the business ever needs one. For the business owner that requires a line of credit, this is a great card (in additional to other lines of credit, working capital from banks etc) to have and you also get to diversify your sources of working capital. Even if your business is such that you pay in full every month, it is a cheap option to have interest free line just in case your business ever needs it.

To sum up, this is a business card that I would recommend any business owner to consider.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 06:00 and is filed under Credit Cards FAQ. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.