Global card schemes
American Express
Premium card scheme with affluent and corporate buyers
Accept American Express credit and corporate cards across in-store, online, SoftPOS, and unattended channels.
About American Express
American Express has lower overall market share than Visa or Mastercard but a disproportionately high share of premium consumer and corporate spend. Travel, hospitality, B2B, and high-end retail merchants benefit most from accepting AMEX. Surfboard supports AMEX as a separately activatable payment method per merchant.
When to enable American Express
Recommended for travel, hospitality, B2B, premium retail, and any merchant with significant cross-border or corporate-card volume. AMEX customers tend to have higher average transaction values.
Customer base
Premium consumers, business cardholders, frequent travelers, and corporate expense accounts.
What merchants build with American Express
Common use cases where partners and merchants enable this method through Surfboard.
Hotel and hospitality check-in
B2B and corporate-card transactions
Premium retail with high average ticket
Travel and cross-border merchants
Restaurants in tourist-heavy locations
How to accept American Express on Surfboard
American Express runs on the same Payment Methods system as every other method on Surfboard. Enable it per merchant, store, or terminal — through the portal or the API, no re-deployment required.
Enable in the portal or via API
Partners flip American Express on for their merchants in the Partner Portal, merchants enable it for their own stores in the Merchant Portal, and developers can do the same programmatically through the Payment Methods API. Surfboard handles scheme registration where required.
Available everywhere
Becomes available immediately on the channels American Express supports — in-store terminals, online checkout, SoftPOS, and unattended where applicable.
One settlement
American Express transactions roll into the same settlement reports as every other payment method on the platform — no separate reconciliation pipeline.
