American Express Co. will partner with Deutsche Bank AG to offer credit cards to the bank's 12,000 corporate customers starting next month.
"It is a breakthrough for our corporate business in Germany," Jean-Luc Durant, a vice president at American Express, the fourth-largest U.S. credit card issuer, said in a telephone interview from Belgium. He would not put a value on the contract, but he did say no similar contracts are planned in Germany.
Kenneth Chenault, Amex's chief executive officer, is trying to boost revenue by distributing credit cards through banks. The New York company said May 30 it reached a similar deal with Industrial and Commercial Bank of China to sell cards to citizens of the world's most populous nation.
Ursula Hellstern, a spokeswoman for Amex, said the Deutsche partnership is Amex's first to offer corporate credit cards through a German bank.
Amex has at least 80 partnerships worldwide with companies, she said. Its previous arrangements with German banks, to offered products such as consumer credit cards to select customers, "were nothing as big" as the agreement with Deutsche, Germany's largest bank.
Ronald Weichert, a spokesman for the Frankfurt bank, said it previously offered corporate clients Air Plus cards through a contract with Visa International. The contract expired in 2000, and Deutsche has not had a partner to offer a similar corporate product since then.
This year Deutsche signed a contract to issue Amex cards to the bank's own employees, he said.
