Marriott Bonvoy Brilliant American Express Card Cardmember Agreement

Pricing in American Express National Bank's Marriott Bonvoy Brilliant American Express Card Cardmember Agreement agreement is expressed relative to the Prime Rate. This review treats those figures as margins, which is what they are, and compares the fee terms that can be compared.

On the face of the filing

What follows is drawn entirely from American Express National Bank's CFPB filing for Marriott Bonvoy Brilliant American Express 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.

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

A margin over Prime, not a rate

The rate figures in this agreement are expressed as margins over the Prime Rate rather than as absolute APRs. A margin is not a rate: the rate is the margin plus whatever Prime happens to be.

The filing's margin figures come to 26.74 points for penalty pricing.

This structure makes the card impossible to price from the filing in isolation — and deliberately so. The rate is whatever Prime is when the statement closes, plus the margin above.

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

Charges beyond interest

$650 a year is the disclosed annual fee, which ranks near the 100th percentile of the fees filed across this corpus.

For cash advances the filing discloses a cash advance fee of $10 or 5% of the advance, whichever is greater. The two halves of that fee cross at about $200: below it the flat $10 applies, above it the percentage does.

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.

What a missed payment costs

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

Grace period and minimum charge

Purchases carry a 25-day grace period: pay the statement in full inside it and the purchase rate never applies. That matches the 25-day median across the corpus almost exactly.

How it sits in the issuer's own range

This is one of 25 American Express National Bank agreements collected here.

What is outside the disclosure

Absent from the captured terms: a purchase rate and balance transfer terms. 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.

The document itself

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

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.