American Express Entry Level Jobs

American Express is an American multinational financial services corporation that provides credit cards, charge cards, and traveler’s cheques. It also facilitates financial services like investment management, wealth management, and payment processing for clients. The company operates in various countries around the world, including the United States.

American Express Careers provides job listings for open positions at American Express. There are more than 100 open positions available at the company right now. Some of these jobs include:

-Assistant Vice President (AVP) – Operations Management – New York City

-Sales Operations Analyst – New York City

-Senior Specialist – Risk Management – New York City

American Express Entry Level Jobs

American Express Company (Amex) is an American multinational corporation specialized in payment card services headquartered at 200 Vesey Street in the Battery Park City neighborhood of Lower Manhattan in New York City. The company was founded in 1850 and is one of the 30 components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.^[6] The company’s logo, adopted in 1958, is a gladiator or centurion^[7] whose image appears on the company’s well-known traveler’s cheques, charge cards, and credit cards.

During the 1980s, Amex invested in the brokerage industry, acquiring what became, in increments, Shearson Lehman Hutton and then divesting these into what became Smith Barney Shearson (owned by Primerica) and a revived Lehman Brothers. By 2008 neither the Shearson nor the Lehman name existed.^[8]

In 2016, credit cards using the American Express network accounted for 22.9% of the total dollar volume of credit card transactions in the United States.^[9] As of December 31, 2019, the company had 114.4 million cards in force, including 54.7 million cards in force in the United States, each with an average annual spending of $19,972.^[5]

In 2017, Forbes named American Express as the 23rd most valuable brand in the world (and the highest within financial services), estimating the brand to be worth US$24.5 billion.^[10] In 2020, Fortune magazine ranked American Express at number 9 on their Fortune List of the Top 100 Companies to Work For in 2020 based on an employee survey of satisfaction.^[11]

Contents

• 1Early history
  • 1.1American Express buildings
  • 1.2Nationwide expansion
  • 1.3Financial services
  • 1.4Loss of railroad express business
• 2History post-1980
  • 2.1Investment banking (Shearson Lehman Hutton, IDS): 1981–1994
  • 2.2TDB American Express Bank, Switzerland
  • 2.3Divesting
  • 2.4Sales practices
  • 2.5Suspension of all operations in Russia and Belarus
  • 2.6List of CEOs
• 3Charge card services
• 4History of card types
• 5Fees
  • 5.1″Boston Fee Party”
  • 5.2Conversion to bank holding company
  • 5.3Charging order controversy in the UK
  • 5.4CFPB enforcement action
  • 5.5Costco exclusivity arrangement (2004–2016)
  • 5.6Airport Lounges
    • 5.6.1Centurion Lounges
• 6Finances
• 7Card products
  • 7.1Consumer cards
  • 7.2Card acceptance outside the United States
  • 7.3Card design
  • 7.4ExpressPay
  • 7.5American Express OPEN
  • 7.6Commercial cards and services
  • 7.7Non-proprietary cards
  • 7.8Merchant account
• 8Non-card products
  • 8.1Traveller’s cheques
  • 8.2Financial advisors
  • 8.3International bank
  • 8.4Travel
  • 8.5Publishing
  • 8.6Individual banking
  • 8.7Business banking
• 9Advertising campaigns
  • 9.1Don’t Leave Home Without Them
  • 9.2The Adventures of Seinfeld & Superman
  • 9.3My life. My card. / Are You a Cardmember?
    • 9.3.1Animals
  • 9.4C. F. Frost
  • 9.5Cause marketing
• 10Cultural projects and sponsored events
• 11Workplace
  • 11.1Offices
  • 11.2Job satisfaction
• 12Management, corporate governance, ownership
• 13In popular culture
• 14See also
• 15References
• 16External links

Early history

American Express Co. early shipping receipts (1853, 1869)

Share of the American Express Company, issued 13. October 1865; signed by William G. Fargo as Secretary and Henry Wells as President

In 1850, American Express was started as an express mail business in Buffalo, New York.^[12] It was founded as a joint-stock corporation by the merger of the express companies owned by Henry Wells (Wells & Company), William G. Fargo (Livingston, Fargo & Company), and John Warren Butterfield (Wells, Butterfield & Company, the successor earlier in 1850 of Butterfield, Wasson & Company).^[3][4] Wells and Fargo also started Wells Fargo & Co. in 1852 when Butterfield and other directors objected to the proposal that American Express extend its operations to California.

American Express initially 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.^[13]

American Express buildings

In 1854, the American Express Co. purchased a lot on Vesey Street in New York City as the site for its stables. The company’s first New York headquarters was an 1858 marble Italianate palazzo at 55–61 Hudson Street, which had a busy freight depot on the ground story with a spur line from the Hudson River Railroad. A stable was constructed in 1867, five blocks north at 4–8 Hubert Street.

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 that were owned by the Harmony family.^[14]

In 1880, American Express built a new warehouse behind the Broadway Building at 46 Trinity Place. The designer is unknown, but it has a façade of brick arches that are reminiscent of pre-skyscraper New York. American Express has long been out of this building, but it still bears a terracotta seal with the American Express Eagle.^[15] 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. To reflect this, the company purchased the Broadway buildings and site.^[14]

The American Express Company Building at 65 Broadway – the former headquarters of the American Express Company

At the end of the Wells-Fargo reign in 1914, an aggressive new president, George Chadbourne Taylor (1868–1923), 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 expanding concern.

After some delays due to the First World War, the 21-story neo-classical American Express 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 “Express Row” section of lower Broadway at the time. The building completed the continuous masonry wall of its block-front and assisted in transforming Broadway into the “canyon” of neo-classical masonry office towers familiar to this day.^[16] American Express sold this building in 1975, but retained travel services there. The building was also the headquarters over the years of other prominent firms, including investment bankers J.& W. Seligman & Co. (1940–74), the American Bureau of Shipping, a maritime concern (1977–86), and later J.J. Kenny, and Standard & Poor’s, the latter of which renamed the building for itself.^[14][16]

Nationwide expansion

American Express extended its reach nationwide by arranging affiliations with other express companies (including Wells Fargo – the replacement for the two former companies that merged to form American Express), railroads, and steamship companies.^[13]

Financial services

In 1857, American Express started its expansion in the area of financial services by launching a money order business^[13] 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 letter of credit. Berry introduced the American Express Traveler’s Cheque which was launched in 1891 in denominations of $10, $20, $50, and $100.^[17]

Traveler’s cheques established American Express as a truly international company. In 1914, at the onset of World War I, American Express in Europe was among the few companies to honor the letters of credit (issued by various banks) held by Americans in Europe, because other financial institutions refused to assist these stranded travelers.

The British government appointed American Express its official agent at the beginning of World War I. They were to deliver letters, money, and relief parcels to British prisoners of war. Their employees went into camps to cash drafts for both British and French prisoners and arranged for them to receive money from home.

By the end of the war they were delivering 150 tonnes of parcels per day to prisoners in six countries.^[18]

Loss of railroad express business

American Express was one of the monopolies that President Theodore Roosevelt had the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) 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.^[13] The solution to this problem came as a coincidence to other problems during World War I.

During the winter of 1917, the United States suffered a severe coal shortage and on December 26 President Woodrow Wilson commandeered the railroads on behalf of the United States government to move federal 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 ICC’s interest. The result was that a new company called the American Railway Express Agency 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).