American Express Co Public (NYSE: AXP) Dow Jones Industrial Average Type Component S&P 500 Component Banking Industry Financial services Founded 1850 Henry Wells Founder(s) William Fargo John Warren Butterfield Headquarters New York City, New York, U.S. Area served Worldwide Kenneth Chenault Key people (Chairman & CEO)[1] Financial Products Travel services Insurance Ÿ FY 2009 [2] Revenue US$26.7 Billion ( ) £ £ [2] ¤¤ ¥¦ ¢ § Net in o ¡e Ÿ US$2 13 B (F 2009) [3] © © T ¨ ot l assets ź US$124 B (F 2009) [3] T otal equit Ÿ US$14 4 B (F 2009) Em plo ees 67 701 (2008) Website Ame c x ess c m " ! Ameri an Express Compan (NYS AXP), s me mes known as "AmEx" or "Amex", is a diversified global financial services company headquartered in New York City Founded in 1850, it is one of the 30 components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average The company is best known for its credit card, charge card, and traveler's cheque businesses Amex cards account for approximately 24% of the total dollar volume of credit card transactions in the US, the highest of any card issuer.[4][5] BusinessWeek and Interbrand ranked American Express as the 22nd most valuable brand in the world, estimating the brand to be worth US$14.97 billion.[6] Fortune listed Amex as one of the top 30 Most Admired Companies in the World.[7] The company's mascot, adopted in 1958, is a Roman gladiator.[8] whose image appears on the company's travelers' cheques and credit cards. Earl# history American Express Co. shipping receipt, New York, NY to St. Louis, MO (August 6, 1853) American Express was started as an express mail business in Albany, New York, in 1850.[9] It was founded as a joint stock corporation by the merger of the express companies owned by Henry Wells (Wells & Company), William Fargo (Livingston, Fargo & Company), and John Warren Butterfield (Wells, Butterfield & Company, the successor earlier in 1850 of Butterfield, Wasson & Company).[10][11] The same founders also started Wells Fargo & Co. in 1852 when Butterfield and other directors objected to the proposal that American Express extend its operations to distant California. American Express first established its headquarters in a building at the intersection of Jay Street and Hudson Street in what was later called the TriBeCa section of Manhattan. For years it enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the movement of express shipments (goods, securities, currency, etc.) throughout New York State. In 1874, American Express moved its headquarters to 65 Broadway in what was becoming the Financial District of Manhattan, a location it was to retain through two buildings.[12] American Express buildings In 1854, the American E$ press Co. purchased a lot on Vesey Street in New York City as the site for its stables. The company's first New York headquarters were in an impressive marble Italianate palazzo at 55-61 Hudson Street between Thomas Street and Jay Street (1857ʹ58, John Warren Ritch), which had a busy freight depot on the ground story with a spur line from the Hudson River Railroad. A stable was constructed nearby at 4-8 Hubert Street, between Hudson Street and Collister Street (1866ʹ67, Ritch & Griffiths), five blocks north of the Hudson Street building. The company prospered sufficiently that headquarters were moved in 1874 from the wholesale shipping district to the budding Financial District, and into rented offices in two five-story brownstone commercial buildings at 63 and 65 Broadway, between E$ change Alley and Rector Street, and between Broadway and Trinity Place that were owned by the Harmony family.[13] In 1880, American E$ press built a new warehouse behind the Broadway Building at 46 Trinity Place, between E$ change Alley and Rector Street. The designer is unknown, but it has a façade of brick arches that are redolent of pre-skyscraper New York. American E$ press has long been out of this building, but it still bears a terracotta seal with the American E$ press Eagle.[14] In 1890-91 the company constructed a new ten-story building by Edward H. Kendall on the site of its former headquarters on Hudson Street. By 1903, the company had assets of some $28 million, second only to the National City Bank of New % % York among financial institutions in the city.[citation n% d d] To reflect this, the company purchased the % % Broadway buildings and site.[citation n% d d] At the end of the Wells-Fargo reign in 1914, an aggressive new president, George Chadbourne Taylor (1868ʹ1923), who had worked his way up through the company over the previous thirty years, decided to build a new headquarters. The old buildings, dubbed by the New York Times as "among the ancient landmarks" of lower Broadway, were inadequate for such a rapidly e& panding concern. In March 1914, Renwick, Aspinwall & Tucker filed for the construction of a 32-story concrete-and steel-framed office tower in which all of the company's operations, then in four separate buildings, were to be consolidated. The building proposal of 1914 was abandoned, probably due to the war in [13] Europe, but was resurrected two years later in a reduced form, at an estimated cost of $1 million. The 21-story (plus basement), neo-classical, American E& press Co. Building, was constructed in 1916-17 to the design of James L. Aspinwall, of the firm of Renwick, Aspinwall & Tucker, the successor to the architectural practice of the eminent James Renwick, Jr.. The building consolidated the two lots of the former buildings with a single address: 65 Broadway. This building was part of the "E& press Row" section of lower Broadway at the time. The concrete-and-steel-framed building has an H-shaped plan with tall slender wings arranged around central light courts, a type of plan employed from the 1880s through the 1910s to provide offices with ma& imum light and air. Faced in white brick and terra cotta above a granite base, both facades employ the tripartite composition of base-shaft-capital then popular for the articulation of skyscrapers, with a colonnaded base and upper portion. The famous American E& press Eagle adorns the building twice: there is an asymmetric eagle on the lower arch, while a symmetric eagle adorns the arch atop the building. The Broadway entrance features a double-story Corinthian colonnade with large arched windows. The building completed the continuous masonry wall of its block-front poda nae and assisted in transforming Broadway into the "canyon" of neo-classical masonry office towers familiar to this day[15] American Express sold this building in 1975, but retained travel services here. The building was also the headquarters over the years of other prominent firms, including investment bankers J.& W. Seligman & Co. (1940ʹ74), the American Bureau of Shipping, a maritime concern (1977ʹ86), and currently J.J. Kenny, and Standard & Poor's, who has renamed the building for itself[13][15] Nationwide expansion American Express extended its reach nationwide by arranging affiliations with other express companies (including Wells Fargo ʹ the replacement for the two former companies that merged to form American Express), railroads, and steamship companies.[12] ' Finan 'ial servi es In 1882, American Express started its expansion in the area of financial services by launching a money order business[12] to compete with the United States Post Office's money orders. Sometime between 1888 and 1890, J. C. Fargo took a trip to Europe and returned frustrated and infuriated. Despite the fact that he was president of American Express and that he carried with him traditional letters of credit, he found it difficult to obtain cash anywhere except in major cities. Fargo went to Marcellus Flemming Berry and asked him to create a better solution than the traditional letter of credit. Berry introduced the American Express Traveler's Cheque which was launched in 1891 in denominations of $10, $20, $50, and $100.[16] Traveler's cheques established American Express as a truly international company. In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, American Express offices in Europe were among the few companies to honor the letters of credit (issued by various banks) held by Americans in Europe, despite other financial institutions having refused to assist these stranded travelers. Loss of railroad express business American Express became one of the monopolies that President Theodore Roosevelt had the Interstate Commerce Commission investigate during his administration. The interest of the ICC was drawn to its strict control of the railroad express business. However, the solution did not come immediately to hand.[12] The solution to this problem came as a coincidence to other problems during World War I. During the winter of 1917, the US suffered a severe coal shortage and on December 26 President Woodrow Wilson commandeered the railroads on behalf of the US government to move US troops, their supplies, and coal. Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo was assigned the task of consolidating the railway lines for the war effort. All contracts between express companies and railroads were nullified and McAdoo proposed that all existing express companies be consolidated into a single company to serve the country's needs. This ended American Express's express business, and removed them from the ICC͛s radar. The result was a new company called the American Railway Express Agency company formed in July 1918. The new entity took custody of all the pooled equipment and property of existing express companies (the largest share of which, 40%, came from American Express, who had owned the rights to the express business over 71,280 miles (114,710 km) of railroad lines, and had 10,000 offices, with over 30,000 employees).