American Express Co.’s brand value has jumped six spots, new research shows.

Valued at $18.23 billion, the credit card company is now ranked as the seventh-most-valuable banking brand in the world, according to the 2012 Brand Finance Banking 500 rankings.

The report, released yesterday by London-based consultancy Brand Finance, assesses the dollar value of the reputation, image and intellectual property of financial services companies worldwide. 

Over the last 12 months alone, Amex certainly has undertaken some interesting innovation efforts within payments generally and with its digital wallet Serve specifically that may have served as a catalyst for its growing brand value. In short, Amex has recognized its wealth of data as key to its digital commerce efforts, a point that an exec emphasized at a fall payments event.

“It’s beyond payments for us,” said Courtney Kelso, enterprise growth strategy, during a presentation. “Opportunities exist where we haven’t looked for them before.” 

With that philosophy in mind, Amex has dropped its luxury-demographic-only mentality and continues to market more aggressively to a larger group of people. We think its innovation efforts are playing a role in its advancing brand, which increased in value by $2.7 billion, or 17.4%.

Two other important bullet points gleaned from from Brand Finance’s research include:

• HSBC scored the title of the world’s most valuable banking brand title; and
• Wells Fargo overtook Bank of America as the most known banking brand in the U.S. in 2012, posting a brand value of $23.23 billion.

Take a look at the data from Brand Finance below: