Amex Makes Its Biggest Commercial Bet in Years With ‘Business Membership’

The corporate card has been a remarkably stable product for decades. It processes, tracks and reconciles. It earns points. It carries a limit. And for most of its history, that was enough.

American Express helped build that category. Now it’s arguing the category itself needs to change.

This week, Amex announced what Raymond Joabar, group president of Global Commercial Services (GCS), called the company’s most significant commercial product expansion in years: a unified suite of tools it is calling “business membership.”

The platform is designed to bundle payments, working capital solutions, expense management software, and artificial intelligence into a single system. One built specifically for the mid-market businesses Joabar says have been underserved by both ends of the market.

In a conversation with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster, Joabar made the case for why this moment, and why Amex.

“What customers want is one platform to consume all of those products and services that we can offer to them. It is more than just a transaction or expense management. It is how [they’re] managing the cash flow of [the business].”

The End of the Standalone Card

The backdrop to Amex’s announcement is a broader shift playing out across business finance. The lines that once separated banks, FinTech companies, and enterprise software providers are blurring. Each is pushing toward a model that combines financial infrastructure with user-facing applications and, increasingly, intelligent automation. The question for any company that built its business on a single product, the card, is what role that product plays in the new model.

Joabar’s answer is that the card doesn’t go away. It becomes an entry point.

In the “business membership” model, the card is the mechanism through which a business joins the platform. What it unlocks is a system that handles expense management, working capital flexibility, automated workflows, and AI-driven financial intelligence. Everything that he says surrounds the transaction, not just the transaction itself. Focused primarily at middle market firms.

“As companies grow from small into mid-size, their needs fundamentally change,” Joabar told Webster. “Expense management, expense control, expense processing becomes a lot more of a thing.”

That evolution, he argues, is exactly what the new platform is designed to serve.

The Working Capital Thread

Joabar’s argument for why Amex is equipped to build this starts with a specific piece of the company’s history. Its approach to working capital.

“Working capital is the lifeblood of how businesses run.”

For decades, Amex’s commercial products have been built around dynamic credit that move with a company’s real activity rather than hard ceilings that create friction at the moments businesses can least afford it. Its no-preset-spending-limit structure was a product expression of that philosophy. The idea that a business’s credit capacity should reflect what it actually does, not a fixed number assigned at the outset.

The “business membership” platform extends that logic further. Joabar described “pay over time” options that let businesses manage the gap between when money goes out and when it comes back in. A timing problem that is, for many mid-market companies, the defining financial challenge of running the business.

“Businesses may have large inventory purchases every once in a while. They need the spending capacity, but also may want payment flexibility to pay over time when they need to.”

Joabar makes it clear that Amex is leaning into working capital as the through line that connects its history to its current ambitions in the middle market.

The Business Graphite Card

The most tangible piece of the launch is the Business Graphite card, a new product aimed at high-spend companies with lean teams. It offers 2% unlimited cash back alongside pay-over-time flexibility, a combination Joabar positions as purpose-built for companies that move significant capital but lack a dedicated finance function to manage it.

For a company making irregular but substantial purchases such as inventory, equipment or seasonal stock, the pitch is both earning on spend and controlling when that spend settles. Joabar framed it as two distinct needs that often travel together in the mid-market, and that most card products address separately if at all.

But the card, he was careful to note, is the on-ramp. The destination is the platform.

Where AI Actually Fits

Talk of AI in financial services tends to run ahead of the reality. Joabar’s framing described AI as an evolving capability rather than a fully mature one, and pointed to automation of the mundane as its most immediate value.

“The suite of products and services, what we’ll call business membership, is really the wrapping of new products along with intelligence software and AI tools all wrapped together.”

The example he gave was expense classification. When an employee takes an Uber, the system automatically tags it as transportation. No manual entry. No category lookup. At the level of a single transaction, it’s a small thing. Scaled across hundreds of employees and thousands of monthly transactions, Joabar argues it changes the administrative calculus meaningfully.

Amex’s structural case for why it can build these tools rests on its dual position as both card issuer and payment network. That gives it visibility into both sides of every transaction. A dataset that, Joabar says, is not easily replicated by competitors who sit on only one side.

“We have rich, rich sources of data from good economies, bad economies. We can train those models to help extend more credit as well as help automate those things as technology advances.”

Who Amex Says It’s Building This For

The target customer Joabar described is not a large enterprise with a treasury department. It’s not a two-person startup either. It’s the company in the middle. Grown complex enough that simple tools no longer work, but not yet resourced to build or buy the infrastructure it actually needs.

He put a face on the problem with a specific example: a 90-employee company in Salt Lake City, 60 of whose staff carried corporate cards. The issue wasn’t access to credit. The company had cards. The issue was everything that came with managing them. The manual categorization, delayed reconciliation, administrative overhead that consumed time nobody had budgeted for.

“The friction is real,” Webster noted during the conversation. “And it compounds.”

That’s the gap “business membership” is positioned to close, as Joabar describes it. The mid-market is a segment that has attracted a lot of attention from a lot of directions. Amex is betting its combination of brand, data and working capital heritage gives it an edge in actually winning it.