Morgan Stanley Blue Cash Preferred American Express Card Cardmember Agreement

Pricing in American Express National Bank's Morgan Stanley Blue Cash Preferred American Express Card Cardmember Agreement agreement is expressed relative to the Prime Rate. This review treats those figures as margins, which is what they are, and compares the fee terms that can be compared.

What the agreement puts on the record

The document behind this page is American Express National Bank's filed agreement for Morgan Stanley Blue Cash Preferred American Express Card Cardmember Agreement. It is issued on the Amex network and the filing runs 12 pages.

On the record here: a penalty rate, an annual fee line, a late payment maximum, a foreign transaction fee and a grace period. No figure appears for a purchase rate, a cash advance rate and a balance transfer rate.

Confidence in the parse of this filing is moderate rather than high, so the figures below are best checked against the original.

Priced off the Prime Rate

Pricing here is disclosed in the form "Prime plus a margin". The numbers in this document are therefore the margin component only, and cannot be read as the cost of borrowing on their own.

The margins captured from the filing are 26.74 points for penalty pricing.

Because the filing prices off an index, the dollar cost of a balance cannot be computed from the document alone. It is the current Prime Rate that completes the sum, and that changes.

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

The fee structure

$95 a year is the disclosed annual fee, which ranks near the 92nd percentile of the fees filed across this corpus.

Taking cash against the card means a cash advance fee of $10 or 5% of the advance, whichever is greater.

Transfers are charged $5 or 3% of the amount transferred, whichever is greater, though no distinct transfer APR appears in the document. On $5,000 that fee is about $150 before any interest is charged.

Foreign transactions attract 2.7%. On $1,500 of overseas spending that is $41, charged on top of whatever exchange rate applies.

That is at the high end of this corpus — around the 83rd percentile of disclosed foreign transaction fees.

What a missed payment costs

$40 is the disclosed ceiling on a late payment fee, placing it near the 72nd percentile of the set.

Grace period and minimum charge

Anyone clearing the statement balance inside 25 days pays no purchase interest at all under this filing. That matches the 25-day median across the corpus almost exactly.

The issuer's other agreements

American Express National Bank has 25 agreements indexed on this site.

Among the issuer's other filings that disclose a fee, 7 of 24 come in below this card's $95.

What you cannot learn from the filing

The disclosure parsed here does not state a purchase rate. Those gaps are gaps in what could be read from the filing, and the PDF may well address them in prose the rate table does not capture.

An agreement filing is not a marketing document. Rewards, perks, welcome offers and eligibility rules are not in it, are not in this dataset, and are therefore not discussed anywhere on this page.

Where the authority sits

The filed PDF is linked from this page and runs 12 pages. It is the authority for every figure summarised above; where this page and the document disagree, the document is right.

In short

The honest summary is that this filing discloses a structure rather than a price. The margins are real and comparable to each other; the cost of borrowing is whatever Prime makes it.