DBRS Assigns BBB (high) rating to American Express’s Noncum. Preferred Shares, Series C; Tr. Stable

DBRS, Inc. (DBRS) has today assigned a rating of BBB (high) with a Stable trend to American Express Company’s (Amex or the Company) $850 million issuance of Noncumulative Preferred Shares, Series C. The ratings are positioned three notches 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 preferred shares.

Amex expects to use the net proceeds from the sale of the preferred shares for general corporate purposes.

American Express Company, a financial holding company headquartered in New York, NY, reported $159.1 billion in assets at December 31, 2014. For 2014, Amex generated $34.3 billion of total revenue net of interest expense and reported net income of $5.9 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 (February 2015). 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.

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