Optima Card from American Express Cardmember Agreement

American Express National Bank prices Optima Card from American Express 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 document actually states

American Express National Bank submitted the terms for Optima Card from American Express Cardmember Agreement to the CFPB's agreement database; this is what they contain. It is issued on the Amex network and the filing runs ten pages.

Terms captured from the document include 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.

These figures carry medium extraction confidence — they are reproduced as read from the filing, which remains the authority.

A margin over Prime, not a rate

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.

As read from the document: 26.74 points for penalty pricing.

No cost illustration appears in this section for a reason: multiplying a margin by a balance produces a meaningless number. The real rate is Prime plus the margin, and Prime is not in this document.

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

Fees, and what triggers them

Holding the card costs $49 a year before any transaction takes place — about the 87th percentile among agreements in this index that state a fee.

Spending abroad costs an extra 2.7% — about $135 on $5,000 of purchases, independent of interest.

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

Default pricing

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

The no-interest path

The filing gives 25 days' grace on purchases, meaning a statement balance paid in full within that window attracts no interest. That matches the 25-day median across the corpus almost exactly.

The limits of this document

This page cannot tell you a purchase rate, anything about cash advances and balance transfer terms, because the filing's disclosure table as read does not contain them.

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 issuer's other agreements

25 separate American Express National Bank filings appear in the corpus.

Its $49 annual fee is higher than 6 of the 24 sibling filings that state one.

The document itself

Everything here is a reading of the filed agreement, ten pages of it, which is linked above and which governs. Terms also change between filings, so the date on the document matters.

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.