The Charles Schwab Investor Card Cardmember Agreement

American Express National Bank prices The Charles Schwab Investor Card Cardmember Agreement as a margin over the Prime Rate rather than as a fixed APR, so the filing discloses the spread but not the cost. This page explains what that means and sets the other disclosed terms against the corpus.

What the agreement puts on the record

What follows is drawn entirely from American Express National Bank's CFPB filing for The Charles Schwab Investor 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. A purchase rate, a cash advance rate and a balance transfer rate are not stated.

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

How this filing expresses its pricing

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.

The practical consequence is that this card has no single disclosed price. The cost of carrying a balance moves whenever the Prime Rate moves, in lockstep and without notice, and no arithmetic on this page can tell you what it costs today.

Parsing confidence here is medium, so treat the figures as indicative of the filing rather than a substitute for it.

Fees, and what triggers them

No annual fee appears in the filing, in line with the roughly 75% of disclosing agreements in this index that charge nothing to hold the card.

Taking cash against the card means a cash advance fee of $10 or 5% of the advance, whichever is greater. Advances under roughly $200 are charged the flat $10; larger ones are charged 5%.

Spending abroad costs an extra 2.7% — about $41 on $1,500 of purchases, independent of interest.

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

The downside terms

Late payments are capped at $40 under this filing, about the 72nd percentile of late fee maximums in the corpus.

The no-interest path

25 days is the disclosed grace period for purchases — the interval in which paying in full costs nothing.

The limits of this document

The disclosure parsed here does not state a purchase rate and balance transfer terms. 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.

More broadly, a CFPB agreement filing is a legal and pricing document. It does not describe rewards, benefits, sign-up offers, eligibility or approval criteria, and nothing of that kind has been inferred on this page. Where a card has features of that sort, they live outside this document entirely.

Inside American Express National Bank's filed lineup

There are 25 filings from American Express National Bank in this index.

On fees, 5 of the 24 sibling filings that disclose an annual fee also set it at zero — this one is among them.

Go to the source

The original filing, 12 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

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.