Credit One Bank American Express® Card review: Decent benefits for a fair-credit Amex

The Capital One QuicksilverOne Cash Rewards Credit Card has the same $39 annual fee (See Rates & Fees) as the Credit One Bank Amex, has a larger flat-rate of 1.5 percent cash back and comes with Capital One benefits. However, the QuicksilverOne falls short with a higher ongoing APR than the Credit One Bank Amex.

The QuicksilverOne skips foreign transaction fees (See Rates & Fees), but the Credit One Bank Amex offers more valuable shopping and travel protections. How much you value these features will be the biggest determining factors when deciding between these two cards.

If you’re building credit, you might improve your credit score more easily with secured options like the Discover it® Secured Credit Card. Discover will automatically review your account for an upgrade to an unsecured card after seven months, which also means potentially returning your security deposit. The Credit One Bank Amex mentions future credit line increases are possible but does not specify when cardholders are eligible for these increases.

The Discover it® Secured Credit Card also offers higher rewards tiers, a stellar welcome offer and no annual fee, unlike the Credit One Bank Amex. Just remember that as a secured credit card, the Discover it® Secured Credit Card requires a refundable $200 minimum security deposit for access to a credit line, which the Credit One Bank Amex doesn’t require.

While the earning potential might make the Discover it® Secured Credit Card more appealing overall than the Credit One Bank Amex, if you value the Amex benefits, the $39 annual fee is a smaller short term price to pay than the $200 required security deposit on the no-annual-fee Discover it® Secured Credit Card.

If you are new to credit, it may be better to start with a fair to average credit card to build a solid standing with the three credit bureaus. Before upgrading to a more rewarding card for good to excellent credit, you can build credit by making on-time payments, maintaining a good debt-to-credit ratio and increasing your overall credit account age.

If you have a poor credit history, you may need to start from scratch with a credit card such as the Credit One American Express. Your major focus should be keeping a good monthly credit report to strengthen your credit standing and make you eligible for better credit cards in the future.

A student or credit-building card’s cost has a large influence on its overall score. 

Students already face a ton of expenses, so extra card costs are best avoided if possible, and people with limited or damaged credit tend often find the cards they can qualify for are much pricier than traditional credit cards designed for people with a good or better credit score. 

We compare a card’s total cost, including any annual fees, account activation fees, monthly fees and more against the total cost of other cards in this category and assign each card a score based on its affordability. We also factor rewards-earning potential into our assessment of a credit-building card’s total cost, subtracting a card’s expected earnings from the sum of its fees. 

To get a sense of a card’s rewards-earning potential, we estimate its average annual rewards rate and average annual earnings based on the most popular spending categories (as covered in the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer spending report). 

However, we use a slightly lower spending assumption ($300 per month or $3,600 per year) to estimate average earnings, assuming students and credit-builders will start out with a lower credit limit, will want to keep credit utilization low and will focus primarily on small purchases they can easily pay off.

Given the many costs students face — from textbooks to laptops — the presence of an introductory APR on purchases or balance transfers also plays a role in a student card’s score.

A card’s APR is also a major factor in its credit-building score. Each card’s average APR is compared against the average APR of other cards in the category, and the cards with lower-than-average APRs receive a higher rating. 

Though high APRs are hard to avoid when you’re just starting out or working on your score, credit-builders should strive for as low an APR as possible since they’re likely to either be new to managing cards or trying to establish better financial habits and avoid falling into debt.

Along with a credit-building card’s cost, our rating system takes into account how easy the card makes it to build credit. To assess this, we evaluate its credit limit potential and minimum deposit requirement.

Unsecured cards with a high starting credit limit and secured cards that let you put down a large deposit and get a matching high credit limit will score the highest according to our “Ease of building credit” rubric and are more likely to appear on our list. 

This is because a high credit limit can make it much easier to keep your credit utilization low, a primary credit-building factor that makes up 30 percent of your FICO credit score. 

Secured cards have a slight advantage in this category since the maximum credit limit on a secured card tends to be much higher than the typical starting credit limit on an unsecured card that’s available with a bad or fair credit score. However, unsecured credit-building cards have the upper hand in another key aspect of building credit: accessibility. 

Cards that carry no or a low deposit requirement can also receive a high score according to our “Ease of building credit” rubric since these cards offer a lower barrier to entry than secured cards that require you to put up hundreds of dollars in an upfront deposit. 

Indeed, some users may prefer to pay a non-refundable $50 annual fee while they work on their credit score than tie up hundreds in a refundable security deposit.

We also evaluate each card’s benefits based on how useful they are for students or someone looking to build a positive credit history and save money on everyday spending. 

We consider the inclusion of a rewards program, student-centric perks and access to your credit score or a credit monitoring service of prime importance, along with the ability to prequalify for the card with only a soft credit pull and a clear path to increase your credit limit or graduate to an unsecured or full-fledged rewards card.

Cards that include these benefits are likely to score higher according to our credit-building card scoring rubric.

The minimum credit limit on the Credit One Amex card is $300. There is no indication of when this limit will increase, although the issuer specifies that it may increase over time.

Yes, the Credit One Amex card reports to all three major credit bureaus, which is ideal for your credit-building efforts.

The recommended credit score for approval is fair to good, which falls between 580 and 740 on the FICO scale.

Yes. The Credit One Amex has standard Amex benefits like shopping protections, travel perks and Amex Offers. The difference is that the issuer is Credit One Bank, not American Express directly.

You can use your credit card at an ATM to withdraw cash, but this is considered a cash advance, so you will be subject to a cash advance fee of $5 or 8 percent of the amount for each cash advance, whichever is greater.