The firm is located at Three World Financial Center, which was completed in 1985, designed by Cesar Pelli, Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, and Adamson Associates. From its tasteful entrance and spectacular lobby the viewer can see that American Express is an exceptional firm. It conducts its affairs the way it furnishes its facilities-just a cut above the rest. This is where one would expect the issuer of the original "gold" charge card and the originator of the international travelers' checks to be headquartered. The strong black marble columns and the dramatic geometry of the ivory, black and rust floor are reminiscent of the great banking halls of the 1920s. It is fortunate that American Express has chosen to remain a prominent fixture in the Wall Street community since its inception. It is a full financial service organization in the broadest sense, with brokerage, overseas banking, insurance, travel and charge card activities-a greater spectrum than any other organization. Many banks and securities firms may be larger both in assets and employees, and some of these also may offer credit card services, but none do so with the élan of American Express. The American Express Company was organized on March 18, 1850 to carry on the business originally established nine years earlier by Henry Wells to transport goods, valuables, and bank remittances between New York City and various cities upstate. By 1852 Henry Wells and the company secretary, William Fargo, decided to open an office in San Francisco to participate in the rapidly expanding freight and shipping needs of the California Gold Rush. The directors of American Express decided against expanding their services west of the Missouri, which was as far as the railroad had extended. Wells & Fargo formed a separate company in San Francisco with their own funds while remaining in New York and running American Express which concentrated on delivery of valuable shipments via railroads and assisted the U. S. Government with the delivery of supplies to army depots during the Civil War. In 1891 the company introduced the Travelers Cheque to replace the cumbersome letter of credit that was often used by overseas travelers. Within ten years the company was issuing over $6 million travelers' checks annually. Today sales are in the billions of dollars in a variety of international currencies. With the prosperity of the 1950s, and the increase in travel and entertainment, American Express recognized another opportunity: a charge card. During the first year of its introduction in 1958, the company issued 253,000 cards. It also played a major role in persuading the Civil Aviation Board to allow airline ticket purchases with charge cards. The first cards were paperboard, but by the following year the familiar plastic card was in full bloom. Railroads, cruise lines, hotels, and oil companies all began accepting the card during the early 1960s, which by then was becoming available in foreign currencies including Venezuelan bolivars and Yugoslav dinars. In 1972 Macy's became the first major department store to accept the card. Today, there are over 43 million green, gold, and platinum cards in force, being accepted at millions of service establishments worldwide-a truly remarkable accomplishment for an institution that, unlike its commercial banking competitors, had no preexisting customer base to draw from. American Express has also expanded into the fields of investment banking, asset management and insurance. The firm's initial venture into the securities business was its 1966 acquisition of W. H. Morton & Co., an underwriter and distributor of corporate and government bonds. In 1981 it acquired Shearson Loeb Roades, Inc., the second largest securities firm in the country, which subsequently acquired Lehman Brothers, Kuhn, Loeb & Co., Inc. in 1984 and the E. F. Hutton Group, Inc. American Express sold the Shearson retail brokerage and asset management business to the Travelers Group in 1993 and spun off its ownership in Lehman Brothers to American Express shareholders in June, 1994. American Express remains in the asset management, mutual fund, insurance and annuity business in a major way through its ownership of IDS Corporation since 1984. IDS was re-branded ass American Express Financial Advisors Inc. in 1996 and has in excess of $200 billion in owned or managed assets.