Amex (The American Express Company) is a renowned multinational financial services company, headquarter located in New York. The company was founded in the year 1850 is quite famous for its charge cards, Credit cards and traveller’s cheque businesses. Also it makes up for one of the 30 components of Dow Jones Industrial Average.
In 1958 Gladiator or Centurion was adopted as logo of company,and they have successfully made their image being printed on company’s traveler’s cheque, charge cards and credit cards.
American Express was started as express mail business in Buffalo, New York in 1850. It was started by Henry Wells, William G. Fargo and John Warren Butterfield merging their express companies as Joint Stock Corporation. It was started initially with its headquarter located at the intersection of Jay Street and Hudson Street, which later came to be known as Tribeca section of Manahattan. It enjoyed market monopoly on movement of express shipments throughout the New York for years.
Later in 1874, American Express relocated its headquarter to 65 Broadway (a location it was to retain through two buildings), which was becoming financial district of Manhattan.
In 1857, American Express ventured in Financial Services industry by launching a money order business competing with United States Post Office’s money orders. Once when J.C. Fargo took a trip to Europe and realized difficulty in obtaining cash in non-metro cities with traditional letter of credit, and went on to introduce Traveler’s Cheque in 1891 in denomination of $10, $20, $50 and $100.British government appointed American Express as its official agent at the onset of World War 1. They used to deliver letters, money and relief parcels to British War prisoners.
The employees also made attempts to arrange receiving money from home for both British and French prisoners by visiting camps and encashing drafts. By the end of war, there were delivering 150 tons of parcels per day to prisoner spread over six countries.
During the year 1980, American Express started a journey to be a super company in financial services and in the effort to do so acquire many organizations to create an investment banking arm. In mid-1981; it purchased Sanford I. Weill’s Shearson Loeb Rhoades, which is ranked 2 in largest security firm in US to form Shearson or American Express.
As per the data of 2016, out of all the credit cards, ones using American Express network constituted 22.9% of total dollar volume of credit card transaction in US. As on December 31, 2016 company had 109.9 million active cards, out of which 47.5 million were active in US alone , each one having an average annual spending of $ 17,216.
In the same year Interbrand attributed 25th ranking to American Express in most valuable brand of the world rankings, estimating the brand value to be US $18.358 Billion. In the subsequent year, Fortune ranked American Express 17th in the list of most admired company in world.