Word: expression
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That change of fortune reflects the revolution that Chenault and CEO Harvey Golub have quietly wrought at American Express (1996 revenues: $16.2 billion). Golub, 58, took command in 1993 after directors dumped James Robinson III for turning the company into an unwieldy financial supermarket. Golub promptly lopped off the brokerage, investment-banking and life-insurance units that Robinson had assembled, leaving American Express focused on credit cards, travel and financial services, including mutual funds. Golub, a sometimes abrasive native of Brooklyn, N.Y., initially slashed $2 billion out of a $13.4 billion cost structure, and has kept expenses in line with...
Wall Street has loved his less-is-more philosophy. Shares of American Express have more than quadrupled in value since Golub began running the company. (The stock closed last week at $88.68 a share, not far from its recent all-time high of $91.50.) Analysts expect the company to produce its third straight year of record profits...
...everyone has been wowed by the company's turnaround. Carl Pascarella, CEO of Visa U.S.A., scoffs at American Express as little more than a small-fry compared with his company. That's because Visa puts its brand on nearly 600 million cards that are accepted by more than 14 million merchants around the world, vs. 42.3 million cards and more than 5 million merchants for American Express. "They haven't changed much," Pascarella says of his rival. "Over the past eight or nine years, consumers have been pulling out their Visa card significantly more often than their American Express card...
Pascarella is targeting corporate and small-business markets, where American Express holds a commanding 65% edge. To make inroads, Visa wants to tap the more than $300 billion that U.S. companies spend each year on everything from pencils to planes without using credit cards. "The big opportunity is to displace cash and checks," says Michael Beindorff, Visa's executive vice president for marketing and product management. "It's a market that's there for the taking." Beindorff points out that Visa has already raised its share of the business market from 3% to 20% since 1991, in part by signing...
That was an epiphany of sorts for a company that had long relied on slogans like "Membership has its privileges." American Express now offers 35 different consumer and business cards, many of them free and co-branded with other companies, up from just five cards a decade ago. "We've introduced more products in a period of 18 months than we did in the past decade," Chenault says...