AMERICAN EXPRESS CO (AXP)

American Express is a global payments and premium lifestyle brand powered by technology. Founded in 1850 and headquartered in New York, it runs card-issuing, merchant-acquiring and card network businesses. Its revenue comes primarily from driving spending on its cards, and secondarily from finance charges and annual card fees. American Express Company and its principal operating subsidiary, American Express Travel Related Services Company, Inc., are bank holding companies supervised by the Federal Reserve.

The company reports four operating segments: U.S. Consumer Services, Commercial Services, International Card Services, and Global Merchant and Network Services, with corporate functions in Corporate & Other. Its products include credit, charge and debit cards with travel, dining, lifestyle and expense management services, and banking and financing products such as high-yield savings, checking accounts, consumer installment loans and small business lines of credit. It also offers non-card business-to-business payment and expense management solutions, including the 2025 acquisition of Center. Dining services run through the Resy and Tock platforms, and merchant services include acquisition, processing, fraud prevention and marketing tools. Cards carry Membership Rewards, Amex Offers and cobrand loyalty programs. In 2025, billed business on cards it issued was $1,670 billion, with 86.6 million proprietary cards-in-force.

Customers include consumers, small businesses, mid-sized companies and large corporations, plus millions of merchants that accept its cards. Significant markets include the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Australia, Japan, Canada and Mexico. Through network partners, banks and other institutions in about 110 countries and territories, it also supports cards issued by third parties, with $227.2 billion of processed volume and 66.2 million third-party cards-in-force in 2025. Key partners include Delta Air Lines, its largest, whose cobrand portfolio was about 13 percent of billed business and 21 percent of Card Member loans, along with Marriott, British Airways, Hilton, Coinbase and Amazon. Products are distributed through mobile and online apps, affiliate and referral programs, third-party providers, in-house sales teams, direct mail, telephone and direct response advertising.

The company operates an integrated platform linking issuing, acquiring and network activity, which gives it data at both ends of a transaction. It uses this for fraud reduction, credit underwriting and marketing, and is exploring generative AI and agentic commerce. Merchants can also be signed through third-party acquirers under the OptBlue program. At the end of 2025 it had about 76,800 employees, roughly 25,900 in the U.S. and 50,900 elsewhere. It is the fourth-largest general-purpose card network by purchase volume, behind Visa, China UnionPay and Mastercard. Other competitors include JCB, Discover and Diners Club, card issuers, merchant acquirers, processors, and payment platforms such as PayPal, Alipay and Shop Pay.