AXP - American Express Company
94.43 +0.10 (0.11%)
After hours: 7:09PM EDT
| Previous close | 94.05 |
| Open | 96.77 |
| Bid | 94.11 x 900 |
| Ask | 94.60 x 1000 |
| Day's range | 93.85 - 97.29 |
| 52-week range | 67.00 - 138.13 |
| Volume | 3,993,106 |
| Avg. volume | 6,727,511 |
| Market cap | 75.933B |
| Beta (5Y monthly) | 1.11 |
| PE ratio (TTM) | 14.23 |
| EPS (TTM) | 6.63 |
| Earnings date | 24 Jul 2020 |
| Forward dividend & yield | 1.72 (1.83%) |
| Ex-dividend date | 01 Jul 2020 |
| 1y target est | 104.43 |
- Motley Fool
Stress Test Results Could Lead to Dividend Cuts -- Should Bank Investors Worry?
The Federal Reserve recently released the results of 2020 bank stress tests, and while no banks are in serious danger, some would see capital levels fall a bit too low for comfort in a prolonged and deep COVID-19 recession. As a result, the Fed issued a formula to govern bank dividends, and there's a real chance bank investors could see dividend cuts from some major financial institutions. In this episode of Industry Focus: Financials, host Jason Moser and Fool.com contributor Matt Frankel, CFP, discuss the news and what it could mean for bank investors.
- Bloomberg
Facebook Critics Target One Thing CEO Won’t Cede: Control
(Bloomberg) -- Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg took the unusual step on Friday of publicly broadcasting a weekly Q&A with employees. Over a live video feed, the CEO announced a series of updates to Facebook’s policies around hate speech -- the central topic fueling a growing boycott of Facebook advertising.But the new policies, like labeling posts from public figures who break its terms of service, didn’t assuage critics. The coalition of civil rights groups organizing the boycott called the announcement “a small number of small changes.” Demands like adding a high-ranking executive focused on civil rights, providing face-to-face customer service for hate speech victims and removing extra protections for elected leaders were still unmet.And, though it wasn’t officially included on their public list of proposed changes, the boycott organizers also have a more fundamental complaint: Zuckerberg has too much control.“Mark Zuckerberg has way too much power for a company of this size and reach,” said Arisha Hatch, vice president and chief of campaigns at Color of Change, one of the boycott’s organizers. “He is the one that is blocking progress in this moment.”Zuckerberg, who famously co-founded Facebook as a student before dropping out of Harvard University, has always been the most important person at the company, partly thanks to his out-sized control of its board. Recently, he has consolidated even more power. Since 2018 the founders of Facebook’s other properties, like Instagram and WhatsApp, have left the company, giving Zuckerberg more say over its product empire. And a number of board members -- including former Gates Foundation CEO Susan Desmond-Hellmann and former American Express Co. CEO Kenneth Chenault -- departed in the past two years, many of them over frustrations with Facebook’s corporate governance, according to the Wall Street Journal.For some, the lack of dissenting voices within and around Facebook is worrying. “This behemoth of a company, that’s operating more as a public utility, must be more accountable,” said NAACP CEO and boycott organizer Derrick Johnson.Zuckerberg is not the only important executive at the company. He has long relied on Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg to run Facebook’s business and policy divisions, and he has a number of top executives who advise him. But unlike Twitter Inc., which goes out of its way to say that CEO Jack Dorsey does not make content decisions, Zuckerberg is clearly the final say on all things Facebook.“The way decisions escalate in Facebook are very much what you’d expect in any complex organization where there was a hierarchy,” Nick Clegg, the company’s vice president for global affairs and communications, told reporters earlier this month. “For the most difficult decisions, there’s one ultimate decision maker, our CEO and Chair and Founder, Mark Zuckerberg.”As Facebook’s advertising boycott has grown to include household names like Starbucks Corp., Coca-Cola Co. and Unilever, the social network has fought back with an information campaign intended to demonstrate how much the company already does to fight hate online. Facebook has repeated a series of statistics in interviews and in emails to advertising partners, including that the company detects 90% of the hate speech it removes from the platform before any user even flags it.The company has also been touting a voting information campaign announced earlier this month with the goal of registering 4 million new U.S. voters before the 2020 presidential election. On Friday, Facebook said it would arrange a third-party audit of its quarterly report detailing how much content it takes down for rules violations.But so far, the piecemeal changes have done little to placate the company’s critics. “It’s unclear what the perfect solution is,” said Mark Shmulik, an analyst at Bernstein Securities. “There’s no kind of silver bullet here to fix it -- it’s a very broad, ambiguous problem.”On the larger issues, Facebook has shown little sign of relenting. Diminishing Zuckerberg’s control over the company is almost entirely out of the question. Repeated shareholder proposals to change Facebook’s voting structure or replace Zuckerberg as chairman have failed to clear the company’s board because Zuckerberg himself has voted against them -- the CEO has almost 60% of the vote thanks to a special class of shares unavailable to public investors. The arrangement has raised the question of who, specifically, Zuckerberg is accountable to.“This is where you have a runaway train,” the NAACP’s Johnson said on Monday on Bloomberg Television. “And that runaway train is causing harm to the public and it’s causing harm to our democracy.”The group calling for a Facebook boycott has several demands around removing hateful content that could prove difficult for the company to adhere to. Facebook said it’s already doing the best it can to find and remove posts promoting hate. In an interview on Bloomberg Television Monday, Clegg said Facebook does not profit off hate speech, and that it had an “industry-leading record” when it came to dealing with issues related to the “dark side of the internet.”But Clegg added: “I don’t want to pretend this is an easy straightforward task, that there is a switch we can flick and all hate speech suddenly disappears.”Hate has always been a problem for open platforms, in part because it’s difficult to define. In some cases, a post that clearly appears to be a rules violation to some people, is considered allowable by others. This dynamic played out late last month after a series of posts from President Trump struck many as a clear threat of violence. However, Zuckerberg said the posts were not actually a violation of Facebook’s policies. The posts remained up and untouched, even though Twitter flagged the same language.At Color of Change, Hatch understands that the social network, with more than 2 billion monthly users, probably cannot remove hate speech entirely, but she believes Facebook can do more within its current structure. “Certainly when things are flagged they need to be removed, and certainly when things are coming from the current president or an elected official, it needs to be removed,” Hatch said.Even though the boycott has trimmed billions off Facebook’s market capitalization, it’s not clear how much influence advertisers will have over the company’s processes. Some of the participating companies are heavy spenders, including Starbucks and Unilever, who together spent more than $30 million on Facebook ads during the first six months of the year, according to Pathmatics, a digital marketing analytics company. However, that’s a small amount compared with the almost $35 billion in sales Facebook is projected to report for the same six-month period.The vast majority of the company’s advertisers are small businesses, not name-brand marketers. Smaller companies rely on Facebook’s direct response ads, which drive specific outcomes like a website visit or an app install. Facebook’s top 100 advertisers accounted for roughly $4.2 billion in sales revenue last year, Pathmatics estimates, or just 6% of all Facebook revenue. So far, only a handful of the company’s 100 top-spending advertisers from 2019 are pulling money from Facebook ads.“As important as these advertisers are to Facebook, it would likely take a far broader advertising boycott over a longer period of time to materially impact Facebook’s ad revenue,” Stifel Nicolaus & Co. analysts wrote Monday in a note to investors. Facebook stock ended the day Monday up 2.1% despite the new additions to the ad holdout.Facebook will have more opportunities to try to alleviate concern this week in a series of meetings, including a round table discussion with advertisers and Facebook executives on Tuesday. Color of Change would also like to meet with Facebook this week -- but the group is holding out unless Zuckerberg also attends, a spokesperson said. It’s possible that the boycott, which is formally running through July, could extend further depending on how Facebook responds, Hatch said.“It’s definitely a live, dynamic campaign,” she said. “We’re hopeful we won’t have to make any further adjustments or asks. But that’s up to Facebook really.”(Updates with details on Color of Change meeting in 21st paragraph.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- Zacks
American Express Boosts Small Businesses Hurt by Coronavirus Loss
American Express (AXP) lends a cushion to small business owners who complain of customer attrition as a coronavirus fallout.
- Business Wire
American Express Provides Update on Its Capital Plans
American Express Company (NYSE: AXP) provided an update today on its capital plans following further instructions from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System regarding the 2020 Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR).
- Zacks
American Express (AXP) Gains But Lags Market: What You Should Know
American Express (AXP) closed the most recent trading day at $94.52, moving +1.18% from the previous trading session.
- Business Wire
American Express Commits More than $200 Million to Help Get Customers Shopping Small with its Largest-Ever Global Shop Small® Campaign
American Express, which has a long history of backing small businesses, today announced its largest-ever global Shop Small Campaign, that includes a commitment of more than $200 million over the next several months to help jumpstart spending at small merchants1, many of which were impacted by COVID-19. Additionally, in continuation of our longstanding support for minority-and women-owned businesses, American Express is building a coalition, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, that will bring together the U.S. Black Chambers, the National Black Chamber of Commerce, the National Business League and Walker’s Legacy with a $10 million pledge over the next four years to fund a program that will provide grants to U.S. Black-owned small businesses to assist in their recovery and address the challenges they face due to racial and social inequalities. A portion of the grant will also fund building the capacity of the network by offering leadership development and business mentoring. More information will be available at ShopSmall.com.
- Bloomberg
AmEx Debuts $50 Perk in Bid to Help Small Businesses Survive
(Bloomberg) -- American Express Co. will offer U.S. cardmembers as much as $50 to encourage them to spend more at small businesses devastated by the coronavirus pandemic.All cardholders will receive a $5 credit when they spend $10 or more at a small U.S. business, with the option to receive the credit as many as 10 times. American Express has committed more than $200 million to the promotion, part of its largest-ever global campaign to “Shop Small.”American Express crafted the offer after it conducted research that found that 62% of U.S. small businesses needed to see a return of consumer spending by the end of the year in order to stay afloat.“We have the ability to drive that spend into local businesses—we feel this offer is truly going to do that,” Chief Marketing Officer Elizabeth Rutledge said in a phone interview.Rutledge says American Express has been able to push consumers to spend at local shops in the past. The firm’s Small Business Saturday event—a promotion held every year on the Saturday after Thanksgiving—has helped drive $120 billion in spending to U.S. small businesses in the decade since its inception.The pandemic has devastated mom and pop businesses as consumers were ordered to stay home to stem the spread of the deadly virus. The typical small business collected revenue that was 50% lower than a year earlier at the end of March, when the lockdown orders were in effect for much of the country, according to data from JPMorgan Chase & Co.Among the projected beneficiaries of the American Express program are hard-hit independently owned restaurants. The promotion corresponds to a new program from the dining reservation app Resy, which was purchased by American Express in August 2019 for an undisclosed sum.Resy At Home, which debuted last week, offers food and products from restaurants on the app’s platform across the U.S. In New York, that promotion includes “At Home Specials,” unconventional take-out packages from 16 New York restaurants and bars such as Pasquale Jones and Please Don’t Tell. The package from the popular Italian-American restaurant Don Angie in the West Village includes riffs on some of its bestsellers, such as pepperoni-stuffed garlic flatbread and eggplant Parmesan lasagna ($95 for two people). In Brooklyn, Red Hook Tavern’s 4th of July package will feature corn dogs and house-made cotton candy. All Resy orders are eligible for the $5 credit.For its part, American Express has been retooling rewards on some of its most popular cards to appeal to the types of spending that consumers are doing at home. The firm recently introduced new credits for wireless and streaming services for its Platinum cards, for instance.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- Zacks
The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Verizon, Lockheed, American Express, Boeing and Micron
The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Verizon, Lockheed, American Express, Boeing and Micron
- Zacks
Top Analyst Reports for Verizon, Lockheed & American Express
Top Analyst Reports for Verizon, Lockheed & American Express
- Zacks
Should Value Investors Choose American Express (AXP) Stock?
Let's see if American Express (AXP) stock is a good choice for value-oriented investors right now from multiple angles.
- Business Wire
American Express Plans Live Audio Webcast of the Second Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call
American Express Company (NYSE: AXP) plans to host a live audio webcast of its earnings conference call at 8:30 a.m. (ET) on Friday, July 24, 2020 to discuss second quarter 2020 financial results.
- Zacks
Stock Market News for Jun 19, 2020
Benchmarks closed mixed on Thursday as investors digested weekly labor market report and grew concerned over signs of rising coronavirus cases in several states undergoing reopening process.
- Zacks
Record Gain in Retail Sales Puts Payment Stocks in Focus
Rise in retail sales favor payment stocks as remittances are being increasingly made through cards and mobile.
- Motley Fool
Is Discover Financial Services a Buy?
Is this fintech company's falling stock price an opportunity to buy, or a signal of deeper problems?
- Bloomberg
AmEx May Find China Can Live Life Without It
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- After years of trying, American Express Co. is finally cracking into the China market. Now the hard work begins.On Saturday, AmEx got the green light to start processing yuan payments, making it the first of the big three U.S. card companies to get access to the mainland. The license, initially approved in 2018, gives AmEx a portal to some of the world’s biggest spenders, and will pit the company against state-backed China UnionPay Co., which dominates the market. Currently, holders of AmEx, MasterCard Inc. and Visa Inc. cards can only use them for foreign-currency payments outside China or on overseas websites. Competition will come not just from UnionPay cards, which dominate the market, but also mobile-payment apps, where Ant Financial’s Alipay and Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s WeChat Pay are big players. AmEx’s partner, LianLian, is tiny by comparison. To top it off, China is also testing out the digital yuan, another budding rival in the payment space. “Having a foreign branded card in your wallet used to mean you have made it in China, but now matters little,” says Zennon Kapron, the founder of a fintech consulting firm.Another challenge is that fees in China are lower than in the U.S., so companies need to win scale to make the big bucks: The card-clearing fee rate is 0.065% for domestic banks and the acquiring fee rate ranges from 0.5% to 1%. In the U.S., issuers like AmEx charge between 1.4% and 3.5%. AmEx and its Chinese partner will also have to convince local banks to issue cards processed on their network, and get more merchants to accept them. Because of the high fees it charges compared with rivals, AmEx tends to be used less in Asia and Europe. Still, there is money to be made if AmEx plays its cards right. One strategy that’s worked in the U.S. is offering plenty of rewards. A large card firm told Kapron, the consultant, that even with the thinnest slice of the market, it would still be profitable. There will always be spenders who like premium cards they can use at home and overseas, he says.Banks, too, could benefit from choice beyond UnionPay, notes James Lloyd, Asia-Pacific fintech leader at Ernst & Young LLP in Hong Kong. More competition can only be a good thing for their merchant clients and cardholders.To AmEx’s credit, just getting to this point is a step in the right direction. It’s been a long slog.(2) Both Visa and MasterCard have been waiting since 2006 to gain access to China. AmEx cleared a key hurdle in early January when regulators accepted its application to start a bank-card clearing business with LianLian. Last March, MasterCard refiled its application, raising its stake in a joint venture with NetsUnion Clearing Corp., or Wanglian, a clearing house for online payments. There’s little clarity on the progress of Visa’s application, which was made in July 2018 without a mainland partner. Of course, there is a whiff of politics in the timing of all this. As tensions between Washington and Beijing intensify amid the coronavirus outbreak, China appears to be holding up its end of the phase one trade deal. The preliminary agreement signed in January included measures to speed up the opening of mainland financial markets, with plans to accelerate approvals for AmEx, MasterCard and Visa, specifically. By starting with AmEx, Beijing is picking off the low-hanging fruit; its mainland partner stands to benefit from any increased business, too.But with Covid-19 wreaking havoc on the economy, it’s going to take more than Beijing’s blessing to get shopaholics back in force, beyond some revenge spending. AmEx, whose slogan is “Don’t Live Life Without It,” may find becoming indispensable in China its toughest sell yet. (1) In 2012, the World Trade Organization ruled in favor of a U.S. claim that argued foreign payment providers should have been given access to the domestic clearing market in 2001, when China acceded to the WTO.This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Nisha Gopalan is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering deals and banking. She previously worked for the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones as an editor and a reporter.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- Zacks
AmEx Wins PBOC Approval to Operate in China Via Joint Venture
American Express (AXP) secures license to build a network business for processing domestic and RMB transactions through its joint venture in mainland China.
- Yahoo Finance UK
AmEx clinches joint venture license to move into China
The approval comes amid mounting US-China tensions, and conflict over Beijing’s imposition of national security law in Hong Kong.
- Business Wire
American Express Receives Clearance to Begin Processing Local Transactions in Mainland China
American Express (NYSE: AXP) announced today that its joint-venture in mainland China, Express (Hangzhou) Technology Services Company Limited ("Express Company"), has received approval from the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) for a network clearing license. With this, American Express becomes the first foreign payments network to be licensed to clear RMB transactions in mainland China. The company expects to begin processing transactions later this year.
- Reuters
American Express JV gets final approval to launch operations in China
China's central bank has given the final nod to a network clearing license for an American Express joint venture, allowing it to be the first foreign credit card company to launch onshore operations in China. The People's Bank of China (PBOC) said in a statement Saturday that it had approved the license for Express (Hangzhou) Technology Services Co., a joint venture between American Express and LianLian DigiTech Co Ltd. It said the move reflected China's continued opening up of its financial industry.
- Zacks
Rush for E-Commerce Sales Puts Payment Stocks in the Forefront
Bumped-up e-commerce sales amid the coronavirus outbreak are likely to lend an impetus to the companies in the payment space.
- Zacks
The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: AT&T, Disney, PepsiCo, American Express and Bayer Aktiengesellschaft
The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: AT&T, Disney, PepsiCo, American Express and Bayer Aktiengesellschaft
- Zacks
Dollar General, Hanesbrands, Visa, Mastercard and American Express highlighted as Zacks Bull and Bear of the Day
Dollar General, Hanesbrands, Visa, Mastercard and American Express highlighted as Zacks Bull and Bear of the Day
- Zacks
The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Visa, Mastercard and American Express
The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Visa, Mastercard and American Express
- Zacks
4 Electronic Payment Stocks to Gain as Economy Reopens
A pickup in consumer and business activities has put in limelight a couple of electronic payment companies.
