American Express is well known for revolving credit products such as charge and credit cards.
In addition, American Express also offers offers personal loans on competitive terms.
You cannot cold "apply" for an American Express personal load.
First, in order to have the option of having an American Express personal loan, you must already be an American Express member.
Some subset of American Express card members will see an offer for a personal loan in their online accounts.
Those members that do have offers available will be able to select a loan amount and a loan term from the options that American Express offers.
Whether accepting a personal loan makes sense for any one card member, and if so which options to select, is highly member specific.
How long do you need the use of the money?
For a given loan amount, the longer the loan term, the lower the monthly payment and the higher the interest rate that will be charged.
You will need to use your judgement to determine the loan term where you pay the least interest while commiting to a monthly payment that you can reliably make.
If the intent of a personal loan is to pay off credit card accounts, then borrowing enough money to bring your credit utilization from high double-digts to low single-digits can significantly raise your various FICO scores.
New American Express accounts often begin appearing on your credit reports after the second billing statement.
All other factors held constant, a new account appearing on your credit reports will generally subtract points from your credit scores.
However, if the loan is used to pay off revolving debt and it is enough to significanly reduce your credit uitlizaton used, the positive impact of decreasing utilization may outweight the score impact of a new loan account appearing on your reports.
In additon, should you have no other installment loan debt, then an installment loan appearing on your credit reports may help your score by adding to your "credit mix".