James D. Robinson III, Transformative Head of American Express, Dies at 88

James D. Robinson III, who as chief executive of the American Express Company from 1977 to 1993 helped transform Wall Street into a more competitive financial marketplace, with a wide diversity of businesses housed under single roofs, died on Monday in Roslyn, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 88.

The death, at a hospital, was caused by respiratory failure from recurrent pneumonia, Walter Montgomery, a spokesman for the family, wrote in an announcement.

A soft-spoken son of the Georgia gentry, Mr. Robinson followed a well-worn path to financial success, power and influence: from private school to the Ivy League and then on to the moneyed canyons of Lower Manhattan, with side trips to the corridors of Capitol Hill.

In Washington, he was among Wall Street’s most influential advocates for deregulating the financial industry and widening its horizons. Some called him the unofficial secretary of state for corporate America.

The deregulation he fought for was largely accomplished with Congress’s repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall legislation in 1999. As a result, commercial banks became empowered to underwrite and trade corporate securities and own insurance companies.

This cultural shift also prompted the securities industry to respond with increasingly sophisticated and complex computer-enabled products. Among them were highly leveraged derivatives that figured importantly in the market meltdown of 2008.

But while Mr. Robinson subsequently acknowledged that financial deregulation “went too far,” he never argued for the reimposition of Glass-Steagall restrictions, which had erected a wall between investment banking and retail banks.

Mr. Robinson may have been best known to the public for his role in the epic $25 billion battle for control of RJR Nabisco in 1988 and his dismissal by disgruntled shareholders.

In the Nabisco episode, an Amex-owned investment firm, Shearson Lehman Hutton, was the financial backer of an RJR Nabisco management group that sought to control the company in a bidding war that was ultimately won by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company.

“I was a facilitator trying to bring the sides together,” Mr. Robinson said in an interview for this obituary in 2016.

That takeover stood as the biggest business deal on record for almost a decade and was called by some the high point of a new gilded age.

The struggle was chronicled in Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s best-selling 1989 book, “Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco.” The book was the basis of a 1993 HBO movie in which Mr. Robinson was played by Fred D. Thompson, who later became a United States senator from Tennessee.

Mr. Robinson’s career was most defined by his putting American Express in the vanguard of his era’s corporate boundary-stretching.

“We coined the term ‘diversified financial services industry,’” Mr. Robinson said in the interview, in his Midtown Manhattan office (where an abstract painting by Frank Sinatra hung on a wall).

During his tenure, the American Express travel and charge-card empire expanded to include Shearson Lehman Hutton; First Data Corporation, a payments concern; Investors Diversified Services, a mutual fund company; and the Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company. American Express also operated an international bank.

Mr. Robinson made an unsuccessful bid in 1978 for the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company and at one point considered acquiring the Walt Disney Company.

But the prosperity of the late 1980s and early ’90s turned into what he called a “dark period” as the stock market and brokerage business slumped and merchants, in what became known as the “Boston fee party,” revolted nationwide over the high cost of accepting American Express cards.

The rebellion forced the company to cut its so-called discount rate — about 4 percent per transaction — to match that of its credit-card competitors, which were charging one-third as much.

Disgruntled stockholders and directors forced Mr. Robinson to resign in 1993, at 57.

Within a year he had joined his son and Stuart J. Ellman to form RRE Ventures, a New York venture capital firm investing in new information-technology companies.

His ouster from American Express came a decade after he had presided over the pressured departure of Sanford I. Weill, the Wall Street titan whose securities empire had been absorbed by American Express under Mr. Robinson.

The brash, Brooklyn-born Mr. Weill, who started his Wall Street career as a messenger, and Mr. Robinson, a patrician Georgian, made a cultural odd couple. When Mr. Weill’s proposal to buy Fireman’s Fund, which he headed, was rejected by the Amex board, he decided he had to leave.

Mr. Weill thought Mr. Robinson bureaucratic and indecisive. But in the 2016 interview, Mr. Robinson challenged a widely held belief that Mr. Weill was the risk-taker and that he was risk-averse. Actually, Mr. Robinson contended, “it was the opposite.”

James Dixon Robinson III — sometimes called “Jimmy…