Word: chenault
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...without American Express plastic. Instead of paying membership fees for cards that many merchants refused to honor--since American Express took a heavy bite out of purchases--more than 2 million Amex holders cut up their cards in the early 1990s. "We were in fairly sharp decline," says Kenneth Chenault, American Express's president...
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...
...part Amex vows that the wars have just begun. "We are by no means uncorking the champagne bottle," says Chenault, 46, Golub's heir apparent and the architect of the company's comeback in cards. "But we are very much in the game, which is a very different situation from three or four years ago." Chenault still winces at the memory of a focus group back then, when the holder of a rival card that earned free airline miles declared, "I want to go with you guys, but you guys are so stupid that you're not offering this product...
...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...
DIED. MARCUS CHENAULT JR., 44, convicted murderer of Martin Luther King Jr.'s mother Alberta; after a stroke; in Riverdale, Georgia. On a Sunday in June 1974, Chenault rose from the front pew of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church and fatally shot the 69-year-old Mrs. King and church deacon Edward Boykin. Condemned to death, he was resentenced to life imprisonment, in part because the King family opposes capital punishment...