American Express

The American Express Company (also known as Amex) is a multinational corporation based in the United States that specialises in providing services related to payment cards. Its headquarters are located at 200 Vesey Street in the Battery Park City neighbourhood of Lower Manhattan in the city of New York. The year 1850 marked the beginning of operations for what is now one of the 30 companies that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The figure of a gladiator or centurion, which was chosen to represent the corporation and adopted as its logo in 1958, may be seen on the company's well-known traveler's cheques, charge cards, and credit cards.

During the 1980s, American Express made investments in the brokerage industry. These investments included the acquisition of what would later become Shearson Lehman Hutton in increments, followed by the subsequent divestment of these assets into what would later become Smith Barney Shearson (currently owned by Primerica), and a revived Lehman Brothers. By the year 2008, neither the Shearson nor the Lehman name was in use.

In 2016, transactions made with credit cards that were part of the American Express network accounted for 22.9 percent of the total dollar volume of transactions made with credit cards in the United States. As of the 31st of December in 2019, the corporation has 114.4 million cards in circulation, including 54.7 million cards in circulation in the United States, with each cardholder spending an average of $19,972 annually.

American Express was ranked as the 23rd most valuable brand in the world by Forbes in 2017, with an estimated value of $24.5 billion. Within the financial services industry, American Express was ranked as the most valuable brand. Based on responses from an employee satisfaction survey, Fortune magazine placed American Express at number nine on their list of the top 100 companies to work for in 2020. This ranking was published in the year 2020.