American Express : Names New Executive Committee Members

The following memo from Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Stephen J. Squeri was shared with American Express colleagues on June 17, 2020:

When I became CEO in 2018, we structured our Executive Committee along our global lines of business and key centers of excellence in order to drive progress against our Framework for Winning. Since then, we have continued to evolve and grow the Executive Committee, and have delivered strong results against the strategic priorities and behaviors outlined in the Framework.

Over the past few months, the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts on the global economy have changed the landscape dramatically, making it even more important to adapt our leadership structure to the challenges we face so that we can emerge in a stronger position to win going forward. As we navigate through this unprecedented time, we must ensure we have the right expertise at the table - especially at a time when our customers need innovative financial solutions. We need to work even more closely with our strategic partners to broaden the relevance of our product value propositions, and the expansion of our network globally is more important than ever.

For these reasons, I am excited to announce that Andrés Espinosa, Glenda McNeal and Pierric Beckert will become members of the American Express Executive Committee, effective immediately. They will continue in their current roles and maintain their current reporting relationships.

In his role as Executive Vice President of Enterprise Credit and Fraud Risk Management and Chief Credit Officer for American Express, Andrés and his team have developed world-class risk management capabilities, which have helped drive our revenue growth while continuing to deliver best-in-industry credit and fraud results. Today, as many of our customers face unexpected financial challenges, Andrés led the development of our industry-leading Financial Relief Program, which provides Card Members with the support they need to weather the storm. His thought leadership in this critical area will be invaluable as we work to continue backing our customers while ensuring we remain financially strong.

As President of Strategic Partnerships, Glenda has overseen the growth of our relationships with our largest and most critical partners, including Delta, Marriott, Hilton, PayPal and Amazon. Most recently, Glenda co-led our Stand for Small coalition, bringing together more than 70 companies across industries to provide meaningful support to small businesses as they deal with the impacts of COVID-19. Glenda and her team have defined our partnership strategy and executed key negotiations globally by exhibiting an enterprise-first mindset to drive results that benefit all concerned. Going forward, identifying and delivering innovative partnership opportunities will play an ever more important role in our overall growth strategy, and having Glenda's expertise and experience on the Executive Committee will be a huge asset for us.

Modernizing and growing our network globally is one of our most important strategic priorities, and in his role as President of Global Network Services (GNS), Pierric has helped us make extensive inroads in both of these areas. Most recently, Pierric and his team played a pivotal role in ensuring American Express was granted an operating license in China, making us the first foreign payments network to be licensed to clear and settle RMB transactions there. This important milestone is key to our overall growth strategy, as the China payments industry represents an enormous opportunity for us. Having Pierric's decisiveness and external perspective at the table will help us as we continue to work to innovate our network capabilities and products for the future.

These three outstanding leaders, each of whom have been with American Express for decades, bring to the Executive Committee invaluable knowledge and experience which are particularly relevant for the times we are in. We will benefit from their diverse perspectives as we navigate through the challenges we face and position our company to win going forward. Please join me in congratulating Andrés, Glenda and Pierric on their appointments.