Part of $800m savings project
American Express is to make 4,000 employees - about 6% of its workforce - redundant.
The cuts will be made worldwide but the US-based company has not publicly said where the axe will fall.
While some detials of cuts have made revealed in the US, Amex declined to say what if any redundancies will be made in Europe.
It said the lay offs were part of a "companywide re-engineering initiative" to save $800m in the rest of 2009.
Beside the redundancies, Amex said it planned to cut its operating costs and scale back investment.
The company last month announced a drop of 58% in its income for the first quarter of 2009 from $1bn in the same period in2008 to $443m.
In its new package of cuts, Amex said it expected to save $175m through job losses, $500m in marketing and business development and $125m in its operating costs.
It said the cuts are on top of those announced last October when it said it planned to save $1.8bn, partly though 7,000 redundancies.
For the last quarter of 2008, Amex announced a fall in income of 72%.
Kenneth Chenault, Amex's chairman and ceo, said: "While we have remained solidly profitable at a time when some parts of the card industry were incurring substantial losses, we continue to be very cautious about the economic outlook and are therefore moving forward with additional reengineering efforts to help further reduce our operating costs.
"We believe these efforts will put us in a better position to remain profitable and free up some additional resources that will be reinvested in the business to make sure we can take competitive advantage of opportunities as the economy begins to rebound."
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