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The all-cash deal could see AmEx paying as much as $850m for the closely held lender, including retention payments and would make AmEx a bigger lender to mom and pop shops. The company is already the largest U.S. provider of credit cards to those types of operations.
Small businesses bounced back faster during the Covid-19 pandemic than other customers in AmEx’s broader card portfolio, and Chief Executive Officer Steve Squeri said last month that they were the “most resilient” through the crisis. “Ninety days on now, we actually feel really good about the small-business portfolio,” Chief Financial Officer Jeff Campbell said last month, adding that a smaller percentage of balances in forbearance are tied to those loans. “Those numbers have come way down.”
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