As you see that American Express company came into Existence with credit cards in American financial market in about 50s. By the time, MasterCard and Visa also introduced to operate financial transaction as an important part of this financial world. They developed their own operational model and set up themselves as reputed bodies in the field of credit cards transaction.
You must be thinking that the work of American Express, Visa, and Master Cards are same but it is completely different. American Express is a private company which issue credit cards to general people with its direct involvement whereas MasterCard and visa have different operation policies in this sense that they don’t directly issue credit cards in the financial markets. Visa and MasterCard set up their funds to establish financial institutions which issue credit cards to maintain their credit balance.
The operation policies between Visa and Master Card are same but American Express has its own operation systems. The annual fees and interest on credit cards are collected by the financial companies in their behalf but not for Visa and Master Cards while American Express charges different interest rate for itself which is directly collected from the card holders.
American Express issues credit cards with its own logo and name whereas Visa, and MasterCard provide their logo to the authorized financial institutions who operate their financial transactions under their policies and procedures who issue credit cards to the general public.
American credit cards are applicable in limited part of the world whereas Visa and Master card have world wide operation. Thus, if you are going for credit card for the first time, you should opt the best for your easy financial life which will also help you to be safe from financial crisis by tracking your daily expenditures.