Centurion Card from American Express Card Cardmember Agreement

The Centurion Card from American Express Card Cardmember Agreement filing quotes margins over Prime instead of finished rates. What that leaves knowable — and what it does not — is the subject of this analysis.

The disclosed terms

American Express National Bank submitted the terms for Centurion Card from American Express Card Cardmember Agreement to the CFPB's agreement database; this is what they contain. The filing runs 11 pages, and It is issued on the Amex network.

Terms captured from the document include a penalty rate, an annual fee line, a late payment maximum and a foreign transaction fee. No figure appears for a purchase rate, a cash advance rate and a balance transfer rate.

The disclosure table in this document parsed only moderately cleanly; the numbers are reported as read, with that caveat attached.

Note that the purchase APR row in this table carries no explicit label in the filing, which introduces some ambiguity about what it covers.

A margin over Prime, not a rate

The rate figures in this agreement are expressed as margins over the Prime Rate rather than as absolute APRs. A margin is not a rate: the rate is the margin plus whatever Prime happens to be.

As read from the document: 26.74 points for penalty pricing.

No cost illustration appears in this section for a reason: multiplying a margin by a balance produces a meaningless number. The real rate is Prime plus the margin, and Prime is not in this document.

These figures carry medium extraction confidence — they are reproduced as read from the filing, which remains the authority.

Charges beyond interest

The annual fee is $5,000, charged whether or not the card is used. Against the filings here that disclose a fee, that sits at roughly the 100th percentile.

No foreign transaction fee is charged, which puts this filing in the roughly 22% of disclosing agreements here that do not take a cut of overseas spending.

The downside terms

On the fee side, a late payment can cost up to $40, which is around the 72nd percentile here.

Inside American Express National Bank's filed lineup

This is one of 25 American Express National Bank agreements collected here.

Among the issuer's other filings that disclose a fee, 24 of 24 come in below this card's $5,000.

What the filing does not tell you

This page cannot tell you a purchase rate, anything about cash advances, balance transfer terms and a grace period, because the filing's disclosure table as read does not contain them.

It is worth being explicit about scope: these filings record terms and pricing. They say nothing about rewards programmes, cardholder benefits, promotional offers or who the issuer will approve, and this review does not speculate about any of it.

Reading the agreement yourself

Everything here is a reading of the filed agreement, 11 pages of it, which is linked above and which governs. Terms also change between filings, so the date on the document matters.

In short

Margins over Prime make this agreement legible but not priceable from the document alone. Treat the figures above as structure, and look up the current Prime Rate before drawing conclusions.