Platinum Card from American Express Cardmember Agreement

The Platinum Card from American Express 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.

What the agreement puts on the record

This page covers the agreement American Express National Bank filed for Platinum Card from American Express Cardmember Agreement. The filing runs 11 pages, and It is issued on the Amex network.

On the record here: 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.

The row carrying the purchase rate is unlabelled in the original document; it is reported here as the most likely purchase figure rather than a certain one.

A margin over Prime, not a rate

This filing does not quote finished APRs. It states margins — numbers that are added to the Prime Rate to produce the rate actually charged. Everything below should be read that way.

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.

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

Fees, and what triggers them

$895 a year is the disclosed annual fee, which ranks near the 100th percentile of the fees filed across this corpus.

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.

Default pricing

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

Against the rest of American Express National Bank's filings

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

Its $895 annual fee is higher than 20 of the 24 sibling filings that state one.

What you cannot learn from the filing

Absent from the captured terms: a purchase rate, anything about cash advances, balance transfer terms and a grace period. The original document is the place to look for any of these.

What this analysis can address is bounded by the filing: rates, fees and the terms around them. Everything a card issuer might advertise — rewards, benefits, bonuses, who qualifies — falls outside the document and outside this review.

Reading the agreement yourself

The original filing, 11 pages long, is linked on this page and should be read before any figure here is acted on. It is also a snapshot: issuers refile as terms change.

In short

What can be said is how this card is priced, not what it costs. That distinction is the whole of the analysis here, and the agreement is the place to confirm the index it uses.