Ah, my adventures in Serve.

They are doing their best to make sure the product is secure, I’ll give ’em that.

When I originally got the Serve card, I wanted to find out which banks charge cash advance fees for reloading with a credit card. My idea was to load $5 from each bank’s credit card and report the results. Not so fast.

One card

Serve only lets you add one credit card as a funding source at a time. I found out that US Bank did not charge me any kind of fee on my Club Carlson Visa and I did earn Club Carlson points on the reload. So, after the $5 reload cleared, I loaded up $195 more, then set up automatic reloads of $200 for 4 days (to reach the $1,000 maximum). The first day, everything went through fine. The second day, I got an error message. I was at FTU and didn’t have time to deal with it.

The third day, I got another error message. On the fourth day, I called. Amex wanted to make sure the credit card was mine. They asked me a LOT of questions about the credit card. They wanted the exact name on the card, wanted to know what kind of card it was (Club Carlson? Visa? – What kind of Visa? – Visa Signature? – What kind of Club Carlson card? – Club Carlson Premier Rewards Visa Signature card?).

The agent was not convinced with my answers and had to conference call US Bank to make sure the card was mine. I was on hold for a few minutes. She came back and said that I could continue to reload the Serve card with the US Bank credit card.

I asked if I’d have to go through this process each time I updated the card. The answer was yes. So now I’m leaning on FlyerTalk’s info regarding the bank fees and will add to the list a little more slowly than I anticipated.

Bottom line

Amex really wants you to plug in one card as a funding source and stick to it. They only allow you to have one at a time, and if you switch, put you through a phone call verification with the credit card’s bank. At least, they made me do that.

I applaud Serve for being secure, but it does make it harder to swap out a different card every month (unless you don’t mind the phone call). Has anyone else had this happen when switching credit cards as a funding source?

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