Word: amexco
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...place to change money, pick up the mail from home and meet fellow travelers is American Express. Famed as they are, however, the American Express offices in Paris, Rome, Tokyo and just about every other capital have never been the company's big profit makers. For many years, Amexco was really not much more than a bank with a tourist front. Lately it has branched into two dozen other areas of business, to become a sort of department store of financial and travel-related services...
...prime mover of the diversification is Chairman Howard L. Clark, 53, a lawyer and accountant who joined Amexco in 1945 as assistant to the president and became chief executive in 1960. The company then was taking in revenue of $75 million annually, primarily from arranging tours and selling traveler's checks, but these activities contributed little directly to net income. Most of that came from investing the "float" of money paid for traveler's checks that had not been cashed. Clark saw that the traveler's-check business, in effect, was a license to print money. Investing...
...American Express President Howard L. Clark announced that Amexco is about to diversify into corporate underwriting by acquiring, for 79,000 shares of stock, W. H. Morton & Co., a New York City investment banking house specializing in municipal bonds...
...scandal and financial burden might have been the downfall of a lesser company, but Amexco has proved that it can thrive despite adversity. Stung into greater efforts by the salad-oil scandal, it used imaginative promotion to boost the volume of its traveler's checks to about $2.5 billion last year, 16% higher than in 1963. Careful weeding of unreliable credit card holders and such innovations as the "Sign & Fly" program, which enables air travelers to fly on credit, lifted the American Express credit card operation out of the red (it lost $10 million between...
Spreading Out. Most of the credit for this resiliency belongs to Howard L. Clark, 49, Amexco's relaxed, forthright president. Clark joined the company in 1945, fresh from wartime duty as a lawyer in the Navy (where he worked with a fellow lieutenant named Richard Nixon). Hired as assistant to President Ralph Reed, Clark watched and learned the business over Reed's shoulder, developed a strong group of young executives, succeeded his boss in 1960. He promptly began reorganizing American Express, giving existing divisions more autonomy and, most important, spreading the company into many new fields...