All right. Up next, we're excited to have American Express joining us once again. Amex continued to deliver strong top-line growth through increased customer acquisition, benefits from product refreshes, including its biggest product, the U.S. Platinum Card, and it continues to leverage its best-in-class brand. Here to tell us more about the American Express story is Chairman and CEO Steve Squeri. Steve, thank you once again for joining us.
My pleasure.
So maybe let's kick it off. 2025 has been another outstanding year for Amex. You're on track to generate 9%-10% revenue growth, mid-teens EPS growth. And as I noted, you successfully refreshed your biggest product or in the process of it. With that as a backdrop, maybe reflect on this year. What were the biggest achievements? And more importantly, how do you think this positions the company to succeed as we look ahead?
Good. Well, pleasure to be here again. Let me start. I mean, this year was an important year for us. It was our 175th year anniversary. So I'm going to take the 35 minutes and go through all 175 years. No, you know, I mean, if you look at this company over that period of time, it's a company that's been built on trust, service, and security. It is a company that has constantly innovated. We started as FedEx before FedEx was FedEx, and now we are the premium card provider in the industry, and I think that's an important, that innovation piece is really critical to our success. I think the other thing that is really key is when you look at our business model, you look at our global premium customer base, and you look at our membership model, we believe that is second to none.
Having said that, when you look back, when we put our aspiration out of 10% revenue growth and mid-teens EPS growth, we put that out in 2022, go to 2020. You look at 2022, 2023, 2024, FX- adjusted revenues greater than 10% or greater, mid-teens EPS growth. When you look at where we are this year, 9% revenue growth year to date, 11% revenue growth in Q3. So what makes that happen? I think it's been our commitment, again, not only to innovation, but our commitment to long-term investing. And I think that then shows up. And where do we invest? Well, if you look at this year, we've invested in product. We did our - not only did we do our Platinum refreshes in the U.S. in both small business and consumer, but we also refreshed other products around the world. Partnerships. We continue to lean into partnerships.
And we re-signed BA, we re-signed ANA, we re-signed Air France-KLM. Now you see people like Oura and Lululemon in our partnership piece. We continue to expand our membership assets, whether that's lounges, more fine hotels and resorts. And those things are really important. And coverage continues to really expand for us. And then we're leaning into technology. And so as you look at that as the foundation, it is a great foundation for growth for us. And that's what makes me excited about going into 2026.
So you've been successful in terms of improving billing growth. I think we're around 8% in the recent quarter. Maybe just talk about what is driving the success. And do you think it is sustainable over the medium term? And I guess I'll add to that, since we're now two months through the quarter, maybe give us an update on billing's performance.
Yeah. So I think, look, when you look at the last 18 months or so prior to Q3, we were pretty steady, right? 7%, 6.7%, 7.2%, whatever it might have been. But in Q3, we were at 8.5% billing growth. And that was about 200 basis points greater than we had been. So what's driving that? I think what you see driving that is more organic growth. You're seeing acquisition levels and retention levels continue to be really strong for us. Goods and services and retail spending continues to be strong. And we saw an uptick in T&E in the third quarter. But to give you a little insight on what we're seeing here in the fourth quarter, the fourth quarter so far looks pretty much exactly like the third quarter. And we're pretty happy about that.
When you look at what happened in what we would call the holiday season, sort of the week before Thanksgiving to up to Cyber Monday, we saw 9% growth in U.S. consumer retail spending and 13% growth in Platinum retail, U.S. consumer Platinum spending as well, and I think that speaks to the refresh and the engagement that people have.
That's great. I'm sure Mrs. Nash contributed to that 13% growth.
We hope so.
Definitely. Maybe more.
Maybe Mr. Nash could take his wallet out too once in a while.
I'm going to leave the jokes out from here.
Okay. You're just wasting time.
Let's maybe talk about the Platinum refresh. Obviously, the hallmark of 2025 has been this, and you gave some stats at earnings, which were interesting. Two times the new account acquisitions versus pre-refresh, record bookings on Amex Travel, and a host of other things. Maybe just talk about so far the successes, what you've learned so far, and how do you think this distances you from others in the space?
Yeah. I think, look, I think for the last seven, eight years now, we've really leaned into refreshes. And what we learned is refreshes work. And what we've also learned here is we're not talking about card refreshes anymore. What we're really talking about is membership model refreshes. And so if you look at how these refreshes have evolved over time, what has happened is it's more about experiences. It's more leaning into Amex Travel. It's Resy and it's Tock. And what's happened is our card members are engaging with our membership assets. And so I think it's critically important that we continue to invest in those assets. And it's not just about credits and so forth. It truly is about experiences. But underlying everything, it's service.
And so when you look at it, whether it's the millennials, whether it's the Gen Zs, boomers, Gen Xers, we continue to outdistance the competition from a service perspective and experience perspective. And I think we continue to outdistance and continue to invest in those assets: dining and travel, fine hotels and resorts, and so forth, that really make a difference to our card members.
So post the Platinum refresh, there was a really big focus on what it means for attracting new card members and generating growth. But in addition, investors have been focused on, obviously, the financial impact, particularly what it means for things like variable engagement costs. So can you talk about how the model works economically in terms of providing enough value for card members, but also obviously making it attractive for American Express?
Yeah. I think it all starts, again, from the top with what the aspiration is, right? The aspiration is 10% revenue growth, mid-teens EPS growth. And I think we'll put a qualifier on that without going outside the credit box. Okay? So we don't go outside the credit box. The second thing that I'll say is when we refresh a product, we look to increase the overall profitability of that product and what its contribution is to revenue and to earnings while either improving or maintaining margin. And so when you look at VCE, which you saw ticked up in the third quarter, and I will tell you we'll tick up again in the fourth quarter, VCE works for us in multiple different ways. When you invest in VCE, what it does for us is it helps us drive revenue because it gets more card member engagement.
The other thing that it really does for us is it also attracts a higher credit quality customer for us. And there's more efficiency in marketing. If you think about this, when you have a product that has more value, you may not need to offer as much incentive from a marketing perspective. And so it makes your marketing dollars work a lot harder than they normally work. And so overall, while there is a focus on VCE, VCE is only one of the expenses within our overall model. We look at lower provision expense. We look at more efficiency from a marketing perspective. And the other thing that you have to realize, which we don't disclose other than the high-level number, is partner-funded value is such an important component of the value proposition.
And so while VCE does go up, and when you look at that, when you look at the value proposition, how can they do this? We have some partners that really want to reach those customers. And so the bottom line is whether we do a refresh like this or we don't do a refresh like this, we're able to navigate within our ecosystem so that we can continue to stay with our aspirational revenue target and with our mid-teens EPS target.
No, that makes a ton of sense. And appreciate all the color on that. I guess one of the features of the Platinum refresh was the continued integration and expansion of the assets that you've built in dining, travel, and other elements of the ecosystem, which you just referenced. Maybe can you just talk a little bit more about what you're doing in some of those categories and how it's driving success in revenues for the company?
Yeah. I think one of the things that we did is we made it a lot easier to access the benefits, right, so when you look at the onboarding app for Platinum, you look at the travel app that we have, it's a lot easier to take advantage of the benefits. It's a lot easier to integrate, to engage with the company. I think the other thing that is really critical, when you start to look at our travel assets, you look at our dining assets, what we're doing is we're creating closed loops within closed loops, so if you think about it, we connect card members and we connect merchants across the entire ecosystem. In dining, we're connecting card members and we're connecting restaurants, and we're able to provide value within that.
We're also able to provide value by integrating into Toast so that now the reservation system can actually now interface with what you ordered, and so you have a better relationship at that point of sale, at that point of interaction with the restaurant. From a travel perspective, again, with the app that we did and the way that you can now interface with us, it makes it a much better experience, and we continue to upgrade from Fine Hotels and Resorts, and then you look at Amex Offers, which we've also continued to upgrade and then now launched Amex Ads, so think about Amex Ads existing within the ecosystem of the travel closed loop or the dining closed loop as well, so we've invested quite a bit there, and I think it makes a lot of sense for us.
I won't ask you how much exactly partners are funding in the Platinums. I know Kartik will get mad at me, but you recently disclosed your merchant partners offer $3 billion of value across a variety of benefits. Maybe you can just tell us more about how you work with the partners and how they support you through this model.
Yeah. I mean, so look, if you take a step back, we talk a lot about the virtuous cycle, right? And so we are very fortunate to have a tremendous customer base. And that is a global customer base. It is a premium customer base. And it's a high-credit quality customer base that spends a lot of money. Partners want access to that. And so as we look to put together our value propositions, and if you look at the value propositions over the years, what's happened is they've continued to expand. They've gone beyond travel into, obviously, into dining and into retail and health and wellness and streaming and so forth. And we have partners that want a piece of that because the virtuous cycle works. What happens is we bring in card members. Merchants want access to them.
As we get more offers, we bring in more card members, and it continues that overall loop. If you look at, I'll give you an example from Resy. When we put the Resy Credit on gold and some of the Delta products, 97% of the Resy restaurants saw a card member that year that was eligible for the credit, and in those Resy restaurants, dining went up from those card members by 27%, so if you are a restaurant, why wouldn't you want to be part of the Resy ecosystem, and remember, we've just expanded now. We've also got Tock, and then with the acquisition of Rooam, that allowed us to do that interface in with Toast, so partner-funded value is really important. It's important to the overall value proposition.
But it's important for our partners too because it allows them to reach premium customers at a relatively low cost, not just on a consumer side, but on a small business side as well.
So I asked you a similar question on the earnings call. And it's only one question. When you go through a refresh like this, can you still generate mid-teens EPS growth while going through this? And just help us broadly think about some of the moving pieces.
Yes. So look, here's the reality, right? And it really goes back to what I said before about VCE. It's just asking the question a little bit differently. But the reality is that when you look at the size of the company, you go back to 2021, we're about a $42 billion revenue company. We're a $70+ billion revenue company as we exit this year. Within that $70 billion worth of revenue, you have a lot more degrees of freedom that you can play with within any refresh or within any initiative. It would be harder to do that as a $30 billion revenue company or a $40 billion revenue company. But you have to realize the reason we're as big as we are is because we've been investing. We've been investing in acquisition of card members. We've been investing in value proposition.
And so it gets right back down to it. VCE, for example, as I said before, works really hard. It drives extra revenue for us. It drives marketing efficiency for us. And it also gives us lower provision expense. And when you think about provision expense and you think about the value of having cardholders who don't go delinquent and who don't write off, that pays off in spades for us. And as I said, I don't want to repeat myself, but the reality is that when we do these refreshes, our focus is on making sure that the product contributes more from a revenue and earnings perspective and that we either minimally keep the margin or we increase the margin. And that drives the EPS. And so when we do this, we don't walk away from the aspiration.
So you're not going to hear us say, "Hey, we did a big refresh. Give us a pass next year." Because as you know, the revenue from this refresh tends to come in afterwards, right? Because you get card members who are in the franchise, get a holiday. They don't get billed till their anniversary date. That doesn't start till January. Now, the new cardholders that we're acquiring, they pay the fee right away. So you then have the revenue come in, which is a nice benefit for us as well because we're able to continue to survive. And as we move into 2027, you'll see some of that revenue come in.
Gotcha. So you talked about this earlier. Several years ago, you laid out the 10%+ aspirational revenue growth target or aspiration. Talk about why you felt that was the right level for the company. And do you still feel that's the right level for the company?
Yeah. I mean, well, the proof's in the pudding, right? I mean, so if you look at the last three years, and we're not going to count sort of going from 2020 to 2021, and when you look at 2022, it was 25% growth, and we've had FX-adjusted revenue growth of over 10% for the last three years, and we're in that range this year. Third quarter was really good, and I think that's the right focus for the organization. This was a company that was between 5% and 7% or so before. I just think that if we want to do bold things, we need to have a bigger business, and when I got up here for the first time years ago, we said we wanted to be a revenue-first company, but we weren't going to do that by sacrificing the credit box.
That revenue allows us to get the scale that we need to operate our business. We get a lot of leverage. At different points in time, we get leverage at different expenses within our operating system. So maybe it's leverage out of marketing one year. Maybe it's leverage out of VCE one year. Maybe it's leverage out of provision. Or maybe it's leverage out of OpEx. But we're able to play with those gears as you go through. And so many times, people focus on only one of those components. We don't focus on one of those components. We focus on the entire playing field of our company because that allows us to make better decisions for our customers. And everything we do, it always has the customer in mind.
So you've had, I think, close to 30 straight quarters of double-digit card fee growth, which again, is a testament to the success of the model. You referenced this before, but can you maybe just talk a little bit about what's happening in the near term with the Platinum refresh? And more broadly, talk about how the focus on the fee-paying products, which has sort of been a hallmark of your time as CEO, drives the overall business model.
Yeah. I think what you pay for is what you use, right? And that's just a simple sort of philosophy. And people are paying a premium price for the product, and they want to engage with it. When you engage with the product, you spend. And so the model is fairly simple, right? You get fees by paying for a product that provides lots of benefits. And you don't have to be a brain surgeon to look at this and say, "Here's $8.95 for the Platinum Card. Here's up to $3,500 worth of value. I think I can make this work." And so what happens in making that work? You've got to spend. And as you spend, that drives revenue for us. Then as you're spending, you may say, "Hey, you know what? I need to pay over time.
I need for this large purchase, I want to put this over three months." And we can do that. And so the model really works from the perspective of you get the card fees, you get the spending, and then you get a component of the lending. Because the reality is our card members borrow. And I'd rather have high-quality card members borrowing from us than borrowing from our competitors. And so that's why we've had this focus. And that's why you look at when you look at 70% of the consumer cards that we acquire are all fee-paying cards. And when you look at the cohorts that we're acquiring, whether that's Millennial or Gen Z, they're paying that fee because they realize they're going to use the value. And again, we've said this many times, we get longer lifetime value out of these cardholders.
As far as Platinum goes, we're exceeding our expectations in new card acquisitions for both small business and for consumer. And we talked about that in the third quarter earnings. That has continued to hold through November.
Great. No, super helpful, so there's been a major focus on Millennials and Gen Z and how to be relevant with them, and you've been obviously incredibly successful in penetrating this cohort. However, does the enhanced product suite, how do you think about it in terms of working for all of your core customer cohorts? As an example, I would imagine some of the things that a Baby Boomer engaged in might not be the same as a Millennial, so how do you guys strike the right balance when designing products?
Let me talk as a baby boomer, okay? I'm a little beyond millennial.
Yeah. All right.
You're more of a Gen Xer. The reality is that when you look at our baby boomer population, we've retained 99% of that spending. 25% of the 1% that we don't retain is because they die, okay? We haven't figured out.
[crosstalk]
We haven't figured out how to solve that yet. But the average tenure for our boomers is 23 years. We've got 99% retention of their spend. For the rest of the cohorts, for the business, it's 98%. When you look at the Platinum, let's just talk about the Platinum card. When you look at the Platinum card and you look at the benefits on the Platinum card, a boomer may not go to the same restaurants that a Millennial or Gen Z goes to, but they eat. They travel. They use the lounges. They may or may not have an Oura Ring. They may or may not go to Lululemon. But there are so many components of that value proposition. So they may lean into more travel. So they may take more advantage of fine hotels and resorts.
They may go to more high-end restaurants where it's harder to get a reservation because you're part of Resy, your Tock. And so when we design the value proposition, we design that value proposition across that cohort, which is why we've expanded it. And it's also why, let's not forget about the Gold Card. I mean, the Gold Card has been known now as the dining card, right? And it's got a great value proposition for dining. So I think that as we look at it, we don't want to be targeted at one age group. We want to have a wide enough value proposition here so that it's attractive to all our constituencies. And I think we've been able to accomplish that. And so again, we use that $3,500 tagline as it relates to Platinum.
But that can go up even higher, or it can make it in a different way. It's all how you use the components of the value proposition.
So let's shift gears a bit and talk about small business. Small business growth has begun to pick up over the past quarter. I think it was up 4% year on year. It had been running one or two. And when we go a level deeper, you noted that small businesses are actually doing very well, but it's been more the middle market where there's been some softness driven by large transactions coming off the card as well as you've been upgrading your expense management offering. So can you talk about some of these issues you faced and how are you addressing them?
Yeah. I think, look, small business, talk about businesses under $5 million in revenue, they're doing fine. Middle market's a little bit more of a struggle, and it's an SME category. And there, a little bit more macro. It's an organic spend story, more conversion to ACH, expense management solutions are in there as well. And the way you address that, if you think about sort of even just the Platinum refresh, we've put thresholds in of unlocking value over $250,000, whether it's One AP and some other benefits that you get from some of our partners. And it's also our acquisition of Center and rolling that out. But I think we're very happy with what's going on with small business, and we're addressing that middle market component.
Gotcha. Let's spend a couple of minutes talking about international growth. Obviously, it's been the strongest growth profile of the company. I think you've seen double-digit growth for many quarters now. And you've also grown this business double-digit pre-pandemic. So maybe just talk a little bit about the drivers of growth there. Maybe let's just start on the issuing side of the business.
Yeah. So from an international perspective, as you mentioned, pre-pandemic, it was the fastest-growing part of our business. It took longer to come back, but when you look at the last three years or so, it's again the fastest-growing part of our business. International business is 50% bigger than it was three years ago. You look at the third quarter, for example, within the third quarter, you had Canada, Australia, and Japan grew at 18%. We've got Millennial and Gen Z spending growing low 20%. We've got Platinum growing at 23%-24%, so it's gone really, really well for us, and the part that I think is exciting for us is we're under-penetrated. We are under-penetrated within the international markets, and we have value propositions that are playing, so that plays out with our acquisition.
And I think we've refreshed like 17 of the 23 Platinum cards over the last couple of years within international. But I think you said you want to talk about issuing. Let me just move to the merchant side because I think the merchant side is really where a lot of the story is. Because if you look at it since 2019, we have five times more international locations than we did then. We're at 160 million locations now on a worldwide basis, including the PayFacs. And I think what's important is the way that we went about targeting it. We looked at what were the important countries, what were the important cities, what were the important verticals. And so 12 of the top countries, we're at 80%. We've got 34 cities right now that we've reached our threshold of 75%. We've got another 20 that we're targeting.
And what we decided to do was to go after those cities where our card members either visited or our card members lived. And then we looked at verticals. And so I think it's like 700 transit companies that we've engaged with now because transit is a big deal, especially from a tap-and-go perspective. And so what makes me really excited about international is that we continue to grow coverage, and there's more upside there. That coverage not only supports our international card base, it supports our U.S. card base as they travel. And our value propositions play really, really well. And we use the exact same strategy that we use in the U.S. from a membership model perspective. And so you'll see the same kinds of things. You'll see Amex Offers. You'll see embedded benefits. And our co-brand portfolio is very, very strong.
So I wanted to spend a minute talking about lending. You referenced that your card members do like to borrow. And your performance has been best-in-class. I think the only issuer whose credit losses over the last few years are still well below pre-pandemic levels. And you've actually seen stabilization in the recent time, the last year or so. And you've obviously undergone this premiumization of the portfolio that has driven this. So my question is, how do you think about the ability to grow at above-market levels and yet still maintain this best-in-class kind of loss rate that you've had?
I think we want to grow as our card members grow. I think if you look at it, our lending has grown pretty much the same as our spending, which we feel comfortable with. When you look at where that lending is occurring, it's occurring in the co-brand book. It's occurring in Pay Over Time with our premium cardholders. Then when you drill into NII, what you realize is that half of that growth in NII is margin. Back in 2017, I think 25% of our balances were funded through HYSA. Now it's 65%-66%. That impacts margin, and we've done a better job from a pricing perspective. Again, we're not going outside that credit box. If our premium cardholders want to borrow, we're there for them. We feel good about the product offerings that we have.
So look, our credit numbers are not going to go any lower. They're at a point where we're very comfortable. We've had delinquency rates at 1.3 for a number of quarters now. Write-off rates are relatively stable. Could they go lower? Yeah, but I don't want anybody to bake that in. But we feel, look, it's been the same since 2019. And we feel really good. And part of that is the premiumization of the portfolio. And we showed this slide. We talk about it in earnings and so forth. But when you look at our card base relative to the competition, not only are our boomers and our Gen Xers better than the competition, but our Millennial and Gen Zers are better than the competition's boomers and Gen Xers. And we don't even want to compare them to the competition's Gen Z and Millennial. Our numbers are that good.
So we've obviously started to see an uptick in white-collar job losses. Some of the companies that presented yesterday talked about just the slowness of the labor markets recently, particularly in adding new jobs. We've seen a handful of companies cut jobs. I guess just broadly speaking, how does this impact your credit? What are your expectations if we do see some softening relative to some past cycles? And how does the amount of fee-paying card members impact the overall credit performance?
Yeah. Look, I think what we have seen is fee-paying card members perform a lot better than non-fee-paying card members historically for us and historically within the industry. We haven't seen anything at this point that would lead us to believe that there's any sort of credit cycle or any softening. We watch it very, very carefully. And I think one of the things that's really critical about our business is no preset spending limit. Remember, we're authorizing every transaction. We're not dealing so much with balances. On a co-brand card, we are. But by and large, you look at our Platinum Card, Gold Card, and Centurion Card products, those we're dealing with on a transaction-by-transaction basis. And what historically you will see is if our card members get distressed, they will just spend a little bit less.
What historically you've seen, if our card members get distressed, they will pay us before they pay the competition, and then, look, if it gets bad like it was at some point during COVID or what have you, what we know is we're going to perform better than our competitors perform, and COVID turned out not to be all so bad anyway. It looked like it was going to be bad at the beginning, but we're going to perform better than our competitors do, and you just look at that at the CCAR. Our write-off rates will lower than anybody else through bad cycles.
So maybe to shift a little bit, obviously, there was news of a recent Visa/Mastercard proposed a potential settlement, including changes to interchange rates and which cards they accept. While you're obviously not subject to this, if it were to go through, what would you expect the impact to be on your business, if at all, and why?
Yeah. Look, it's really too early to comment. The settlement hasn't been approved yet, but I'll make a couple of general comments. I think that as you look at this, I think what's important for us is that our card members are not discriminated against. I think surcharging in general is a bad customer experience embedded in your prices, if you want. But I think putting on a surcharge is a really bad customer experience. And I think the other thing is, regardless of what happens, unlike a lot of the issues in the United States, we've been through this. We've been through this in Europe. We've been through this in Australia. We've got a lot of history, and we know how to navigate these situations.
And so, as we do with anything, we wargame things out, and we'll see how it plays, and we'll react and look to come out on the other side just smelling like a rose.
I think I smell it already. It feels like your business should be a major beneficiary of AI, whether it's generative or agentic. Maybe just talk a little bit about how you're leveraging these and where do you expect the benefits to show up most: costs, customer service ratings, and how are you judging the success of these?
Yeah. Look, I think, look, we've been playing, not just playing, but really implementing AI for the last 15 years as it relates to credit, as it relates to fraud, cyber, marketing, and so forth. And so that's played out. I think for us, you'll see things like AML and KYC will be able to deploy it to reduce costs, travel, chatbots, things like that. But what I really want to focus in on is, I think, the import that it can have for driving our business forward. And so I think agentic commerce is really tailor-made for the closed loop. And we've been working with Google and with others to look to set standards. We've been involved in a lot of agentic commerce pilots. We've been embedding Amex assets into large language models. We've been doing our own large language models with our own assets.
I think the closed loop, our data, trust, service, and security really does play well for us. So, yeah, we'll probably save some money from a cost perspective, and we'll avoid more costs down the road. I'm more excited about it from a revenue generation perspective and really integrating and utilizing our data. I mean, one of the things everybody always talks about is, how can you use your data even better? I think with these agentic tools, it really does play to the dataset that we have.
So we're in the last couple of seconds here. And maybe to wrap up, as you look out over the next few years, I guess, what is your takeaway message that you want to leave investors with today?
Look, I mean, and I'll give you the same message I had sort of last year. You're looking at a company that, out of the S&P 500, it's in the top quartile from a revenue perspective and an EPS perspective. If you're interested in a company with high revenue growth, mid-teens EPS growth, high ROE, good credit profile, global premium customer base, and a great brand and a unique business model, you may want to consider investing in us.
With that, we will end. Please join me in thanking Steve.