• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, September 21, 2012

American Express is among the latest brands—and first financial services company--to announce an integration with the new Apple’s new Passbook mobile wallet. The iOS 6 feature allows users to store things like airline boarding passes, movie tickets and coupons in one place instead of having to go through individual apps to find them.

With its own offering for Passbook, AmEx, dubbed American Express Pass, aims to go a step farther by giving cardmembers access to account information-- recent spending updates, purchase notifications, real-time account balances, and customer service help on their iPhone or iPod.

“This is an entirely new use-case for Pass that makes it useful every day, and not just for a specific occasion,” stated the company in announcing the new service. “AmEx cardmembers visit the account summary page online about 30 million times a month, so this is a functionality that will be very useful in Passbook.”

AmEx customers won’t be able to use Passbook to pay for things. But the company said people can use AmEx Pass as a digital manifestation of the card to gain access to some upcoming American Express-sponsored events.

The AmEx integration goes live today with the launch of the iPhone 5. Other initial Passbook partners include Delta, Fandango, MLB, Sephora and Target.