American Express Company (NYSE:AXP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Lisa Ellis: Terrific. Thank you. Thanks for squeezing me in. I had a question about international. The 26% of business growth in international really caught my eye because that figure is more than 2x of what Visa and Mastercard’s international credit growth was in the fourth quarter. And so I was hoping to just dig in a little bit, so into what €“ looking at your international business is driving that and how sustainable it is? It looks like it’s mostly driven by spending per card. The card growth isn’t unusually high. So, is there a €“ I am trying to understand, is this a significant share gain going on? Is this acceptance that you are driving? Is this something unique about the geographic composition of the customer base. Can you just dig into that a little bit? Thank you.

Steve Squeri: Yes. So, Lisa, I think it’s €“ look, pre-pandemic, we are pretty close to 20% anyway from an international perspective. And look, it’s a smaller base than Visa, Mastercard. And it’s a really high premium customer segment. And it’s a segment that travels €“ it’s a card base that travels quite a bit. So, pre-pandemic, we were growing in that 20% range. And that growth was due to a real focus on value proposition and a focus on merchant acceptance. I think what you are seeing right now, which is 26% growth, which is slightly outsized growth is still a recovery from the pandemic, right. I mean if you think about it, this 26% growth quarter-over-quarter, you still had a lot of lockdowns. People were not traveling last year at this time in international and so.

Look, we are €“ our goal is to €“ our hope is to continue to grow this business as it was pre-pandemic at around that 20% level. But from my perspective, there is really nothing unusual here. We are sticking to our strategy, enhancing the value, continuing to add merchant acceptance and continuing to invest in this segment €“ these two segments of small business and international consumer card, which were fast-growing pre-pandemic, so nothing really unusual. And it probably normalizes a little bit as the year goes because people were getting out there and traveling and we got into the second and third quarters.

Kerri Bernstein: With that, we will bring the call to an end. Thank you for joining today’s call and for your continued interest in American Express. The IR team will be available for any follow-up questions. Operator, back to you.

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, the webcast replay will be available on our Investor Relations website at ir.americanexpress.com shortly after the call. You can also access a digital replay of the call at 877-660-6853 or 201-612-7415, access code 13734498 after 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time on January 27th through February 3rd. That will conclude our conference call for today. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.