DBRS Assigns Rating of ‘A’ to American Express Company’s Subordinated Notes Due 2024; Trend Stable

DBRS, Inc. (DBRS) has today assigned a rating of ‘A’ with a Stable trend to American Express Company’s (Amex or the Company) $600 million issuance of Subordinated Notes Due 2024. The ratings are positioned one notch below Amex’s Issuer and Long-Term Debt rating of A (high), which also carries a Stable trend. This notching is consistent with DBRS’s base notching policy for mandatory pay subordinated notes.

Amex expects to use the net proceeds from the sale of the subordinated notes for general corporate purposes.

American Express Company, a financial holding company headquartered in New York, NY, reported $153.9 billion in assets at September 30, 2014. For the nine months ending September 30, 2014, Amex generated $25.2 billion of total revenue net of interest expense and reported net income of $4.4 billion.

Notes:
All figures are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted.

The principal applicable methodology is the Global Methodology for Rating Finance Companies (October 2014). Other applicable methodologies include Global Methodology for Rating Banks and Banking Organisations (June 2014), DBRS Criteria: Support Assessments for Banks and Banking Organisations (January 2014) and DBRS Criteria: Rating Bank Capital Securities – Subordinated, Hybrid, Preferred & Contingent Capital Securities (December 2013). These can be found at: http://www.dbrs.com/about/methdologies.

The primary sources of information used for this rating include company documents and SNL Financial. DBRS considers the information available to it for the purposes of providing this rating was of satisfactory quality.

This rating is endorsed by DBRS Ratings Limited for use in the European Union.

Lead Analyst: David Laterza
Rating Committee Chair: Roger Lister
Initial Rating Date: 2 May 2008
Most Recent Rating Update: 16 May 2014

For additional information on this rating, please refer to the linking document under Related Research.