American Express Company vs Brex Inc.: Strategic Comparison

This in-depth comparison examines American Express Company and Brex Inc. across revenue, market value, business model, competitive positioning, and long-term growth strategy. Whether you are researching American Express Company on its own, evaluating Brex Inc., or weighing the two companies side by side, the breakdown below highlights where each company leads and where the gap between American Express Company and Brex Inc. is widest.

On the headline numbers, annual revenue is $72.2B (FY2025) for American Express Company and N/A for Brex Inc., while their respective market capitalizations stand at $205.8B and N/A. Both American Express Company and Brex Inc. are headquartered in United States. Their local markets and applicable rules may still differ.

American Express Company: American Express is a payments company that sells access to its own card members. It does not rent its network to thousands of issuing banks the way Visa and Mastercard do; it issues the cards, signs the merchants and keeps the discount fee. In FY2025 it carried $1,897.0 billion of network volumes, had 152.8 million cards in force worldwide including 86.6 million it issues itself, and reported $72.2 billion in total revenues net of interest expense. The premium lineup runs from the Green Card up through the Gold Card at $325 a year, the Platinum Card at $895 after its September 2025 refresh, and the invitation-only Centurion Card, whose fee the company does not publish. The company is headquartered in New York City, New York. Before becoming a global symbol of wealth and credit, the corporation actually launched in Buffalo, New York as an express mail dispatch business, rapidly pivoting into financial services as cross-country travel exploded.

Brex Inc.: Brex started with a simple problem: newly funded startups had cash in the bank but no credit history, so banks asked founders for personal guarantees or deposits before issuing a corporate card. Brex set card limits from the company's cash balance instead, signed up more than 1,000 customers within months of its 2018 launch, and added cash accounts, bill pay, travel and expense software over the next six years. It moved upmarket in 2022, cut costs hard in 2024, and in 2026 became part of Capital One. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

American Express Company and Brex Inc. pursue distinct approaches to generating revenue, and understanding how each company operates is the foundation of any fair comparison between American Express Company and Brex Inc..

American Express Company business model: American Express runs a closed-loop payments business: it issues the card, owns the network, underwrites the credit and contracts with the merchant. Visa and Mastercard only move the transaction between an issuing bank and an acquiring bank, so they never see both sides of a purchase. Because Amex holds every side of the relationship, it keeps the whole merchant discount fee rather than sharing it, and in FY2025 discount revenue equalled 2.24 percent of the $1,669.8 billion its card members billed. The trade-off is price: merchants pay more to accept Amex than to accept an open-loop card, so the company has to justify the rate with card members who spend more. Average spending per proprietary basic card member was $25,453 in 2025. Amex funds that proposition with annual fees, which reached $10.0 billion in net card fees in FY2025 at an average of $117 per proprietary card, and spends the money back on Membership Rewards, the Centurion Lounge network, Resy and Tock dining access and service. Since converting to a bank holding company in 2008 it has also lent against card balances through American Express National Bank, producing $17.4 billion of net interest income in FY2025.

Brex Inc. business model: Brex makes most of its money from interchange, the fee a merchant's bank pays each time a Brex card is used. Sacra estimates Brex collects about 2.7% of card volume as gross revenue and keeps roughly 65% gross margin after paying its issuing and network partners. Software is a growing second stream: Brex Essentials is free, while Brex Premium costs $12 per user per month and adds approval chains, live budgets, AI expense audits and travel policies. Brex also earns fees from the partner banks and funds that hold customer cash, and transaction revenue from bill pay. The card is the entry point; software, banking and payments are sold as the customer grows.

The durability of a company's moat often decides long-term winners. Here is how the competitive advantages of American Express Company stack up against those of Brex Inc..

American Express Company competitive advantage: American Express competes on the spending power of its card members rather than on price or ubiquity. Average spending per proprietary basic card member was $25,453 in 2025, which is the argument it makes to merchants who pay a higher discount rate, an average of 2.24 percent of billed business. Owning both sides of the transaction also gives it card member and merchant data that open-loop networks do not hold, which feeds underwriting and targeted offers. Credit outcomes reflect the customer mix: a 2.0 percent net write-off rate on consumer and small business loans and receivables in 2025, with 1.3 percent of balances 30 or more days past due.

Brex Inc. competitive advantage: Brex's main technical advantage is its own card-issuing stack. It integrated directly with Mastercard rather than relying on a third-party processor, which lets it issue local corporate cards, settle in local currency and reimburse employees in more than 50 countries. That matters to multinational customers such as Anthropic, Arm and Robinhood. Since April 2026 it also has Capital One's balance sheet, brand and distribution behind it, plus a $950 million investment the bank said it would make in Brex.

Future prospects matter as much as current results. The growth strategies below explain how American Express Company and Brex Inc. each plan to expand from here.

American Express Company growth strategy: Amex's growth strategy is aggressively focused on capturing the next generation of wealthy spenders: Millennials and Gen Z. They have successfully revamped their well-known Platinum and Gold cards with perks tailored specifically for younger demographics (like Uber credits and dining rewards), resulting in rapid growth among younger cohorts. Additionally, they are heavily targeting small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), aggressively expanding their corporate card and B2B payment processing services to capture large commercial spending volumes.

Brex Inc. growth strategy: Brex's growth since 2024 has come from enterprise customers, international companies and partners. It serves more than 300 public companies, holds an EU payment institution licence obtained in August 2025, and distributes its cards through other software: Brex Embedded partners include Navan, Zip, Coupa and Sabre, and Brex is the default commercial card for Fifth Third Bank's commercial clients, according to Sacra. Under Capital One, the plan is to reach far more mainstream US businesses through the bank's distribution.

A closer look at the financial trajectory of American Express Company and Brex Inc. rounds out the comparison.

American Express Company: American Express reported $72.2 billion in total revenues net of interest expense for FY2025, up 10 percent, and $10.8 billion of net income, or $15.38 per diluted share. The mix is less fee-only than its premium image suggests: discount revenue on merchant transactions was $37.4 billion, net interest income on card member loans was $17.4 billion, net card fees were $10.0 billion and service fees and other revenue were $7.5 billion. Growth in 2025 came disproportionately from the two smaller lines, with net card fees up 18 percent and net interest income up 12 percent against 6 percent growth in discount revenue. Return on average equity was 33.9 percent, the net write-off rate on consumer and small business loans and receivables was 2.0 percent, and the company declared $3.28 per share in dividends while average diluted shares fell from 713 million to 696 million. American Express Company (Amex) is a massive multinational financial services corporation, sustaining a formidable market valuation usually exceeding $150 billion.

Brex Inc.: Brex never published audited results as a private company. Sacra estimates annualized revenue slowed to $312 million in 2022, growing 30%, while the company was reportedly burning about $22 million a month. After the January 2024 restructuring, growth picked up: Brex said in February 2025 that enterprise revenue rose 80% with net revenue retention near 140%, and Sacra estimates total annualized revenue reached $700 million in August 2025, up 50%. Brex turned operating-cash-flow positive for the first time in October 2025, according to Sacra. Before the sale it raised about $2.3 billion in equity. Capital One paid $5.15 billion, roughly 58% below the $12.3 billion valuation of 2021.