Corporate Misconduct Case Study: American Express Centurion Bank and Its Impact on Card Members

Imagine losing your job and turning to a “protection” product you’ve been paying for every month, only to find the benefit doesn’t even cover your minimum credit card payment. Imagine paying for an identity theft monitoring service, only to discover years later that you were never fully enrolled and the service was never active. Or imagine being sold a product in Spanish, only to receive all the instructions on how to use it in English, rendering it useless.

For hundreds of thousands of American Express Centurion Bank (AECB) customers, these were not hypotheticals. They were the real-world consequences of the bank’s systemic, multi-year campaign to market and sell credit card “add-on” products using deceptive and unfair practices that enriched the company at the direct expense of its own customers.

The Corporate Playbook: How the Harm Was Done

AECB, a subsidiary of the financial giant American Express, sold a suite of fee-based products to its card members, including “Account Protector,” “ID Protection Products,” and “Lost Wallet Protector.” These products were marketed as forms of security and peace of mind. However, an investigation by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) found that the bank’s own “ineffective oversight” led to a series of improper practices designed to sell these products, regardless of whether the customer understood, needed, or could even use them.

• Account Protector Deception: Telemarketers for this debt cancellation product allegedly misled customers with a barrage of false promises. They represented that the benefit would cover a card member’s minimum payment when it often did not; implied benefits would last for 24 months when for most “life events” they only lasted one to three months; and misrepresented how fees were calculated.
• ID Protection Failure: The bank used a “two-step enrollment process” for its identity protection products but failed to inform customers about the second step. As a result, approximately 85 percent of enrolled customers paid the full monthly fee without ever receiving the full benefits of the service, like credit monitoring, that they were paying for.
• Language & Cultural Exploitation: In Puerto Rico, 97 percent of customers for the “Lost Wallet PR” product were enrolled via telemarketing calls conducted in Spanish. However, the bank then sent all written materials and instructions for the product exclusively in English, effectively preventing many of these customers from understanding how to use the benefits they had purchased.

A Cascade of Consequences: The Real-World Impact

This was not a victimless series of marketing errors. The bank’s practices translated into direct financial harm for a staggering number of people, turning products sold as “protection” into sources of financial injury.

Economic Ruin

The systemic deception resulted in millions of dollars being improperly extracted from the bank’s own customer base. The financial harm was clear, quantifiable, and widespread.

This table does not even include the secondary financial damages, such as when an insufficient “Account Protector” benefit payment led to a customer being hit with late fees and a penalty APR.

A System Designed for This: Profit, Deregulation, and Power

This is an analysis.

The American Express Centurion Bank case is a textbook example of a corporate strategy born from a neoliberal economic ideology that prioritizes shareholder value and revenue growth above all else. The creation and aggressive marketing of “add-on” products are a classic tactic in the financial services industry to extract more fee-based income from an existing customer base.

In this model, the customer is no longer just a client to be served, but a resource to be maximized. The systemic nature of the deception—from misleading telemarketing scripts to intentionally broken enrollment processes to culturally incompetent communications—reveals that this was not the work of a few rogue employees.

It was the predictable outcome of a corporate system that incentivized sales without implementing the “effective oversight” necessary to ensure those sales were ethical or even legal. This is a system that views consumer protection not as a moral imperative, but as a bureaucratic hurdle to be navigated or, if possible, ignored.

Dodging Accountability: How the Powerful Evade Justice

The outcome of this case highlights a common feature of corporate accountability in America. The bank resolved the matter by entering into a “Consent Order” with the CFPB. This legal mechanism allowed the bank to agree to the penalties “without admitting or denying any of the findings of fact or violations of law”.

This is a crucial tool for corporations to manage public perception. It allows them to write a check and promise to do better, without ever having to publicly take responsibility for the harm they caused. The financial penalty, while substantial, must be viewed in context. AECB was ordered to pay:

• A minimum of $40.9 million in restitution to its victims.
• A $3.6 million civil money penalty.

For a financial institution of this size, such penalties, while significant, can be treated as a manageable cost of doing business—a price to pay for years of profitable, albeit illegal, practices. No individual executives were named or held personally accountable in this order.

Reclaiming Power: Pathways to Real Change

This case demonstrates that even with a dedicated watchdog agency like the CFPB, consumer harm can persist for years before being addressed. Meaningful, systemic change requires a shift in how we regulate corporate behavior.

This includes banning deceptive marketing practices outright, with zero tolerance for misleading scripts or intentionally confusing enrollment processes. It requires that fines for misconduct be tied to a company’s revenue and profits, ensuring they are always punitive rather than a rounding error on a balance sheet. Furthermore, it demands a legal framework that holds the individual executives who oversee and profit from these deceptive systems personally and financially accountable for the harm they cause.

Conclusion: A Story of a System, Not an Exception

The American Express Centurion Bank consent order is a story about the deep imbalance of power in our financial system. It reveals a late-stage capitalist economy where a trusted, blue-chip brand can systemically mislead hundreds of thousands of its own customers for years. The bank’s actions were the calculated result of a system that incentivizes profit extraction over consumer protection. This is a clear and powerful warning about a system where, without constant vigilance and forceful regulation, the consumer is always the last priority.

All factual claims in this article were derived from the public document: File No. 2013-CFPB-0011, In the Matter of AMERICAN EXPRESS CENTURION BANK, issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The CFPB’s source on this controversy involving American Express can be found here: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-and-american-express-reach-resolution-address-discriminatory-card-terms-puerto-rico-and-us-territories/