In a recent earning call American Express CEO Steve Squeri touched on a few interesting points and plans for 2021 (full transcript here). Focus on retention and product refreshes:
I think from a card existing cardholder perspective, we’re going to be very focused on retention. We’ve had retention levels that are you know probably better than we’ve ever had. Certainly, better than we’ve had in 2019. And we will continue to do that through you know product refreshes and what have you.
So I would look towards 2021 for the value refreshes. And the reality is we will be doing product refreshes in 2021 that was always the plan.
Statistics behind how many cardholders used the temporary credits:
You mentioned streaming and you mentioned wireless.
75% of our customers that had platinum cards in the US took advantage of those credits. 60% of our small business customers, 40% of our co-brand customers, 90% of our international platinum card holders took advantage of value injection. And one of the statistic, as we looked at our platinum card holders, we had people — so 11% of our platinum card holders had not put wireless on their card and 9% had not put streaming on their card. And so we now have that from a recurring perspective and we feel really good about that.
As mentioned by Squeri continued product refreshes were always part of the plan, in fact he touched on these refreshes earlier in the year as well. We have also seen strong retention offers from American Express, including on cards with no annual fee.
View Comments (64)
I bet the PayPal $180 offer was already in place and ready to launch during that call.
Card refresh policy: Clawbacks instead of cashback via Amex Offers.
called the other day as my annual fee is about to post next week and got $500 statement credit no spend requirement for my personal platinum card. YTD spend about $8K
I used chat a few days before the annual fee. I was offered and accepted 50k points. They were reflected within 48 hours. I didn't ask for a retention offer, but mention that I applied for the card due to its travel benefits and with the current situation haven't used them this calendar year and not optimistic about next. Also, that I was exploring options before the membership fee in a few days including cancelation. The agent tried to convince me of the cards value through the remainder of the year. I explained those were great, but the fee is for next year and those offers i used expire this year. The agent then offered the 50k.
5 year Amex Platinum card holder and was offered nothing to keep it another year. Plus they took away my Pay over time feature. No brainer....cut the apron strings once and for all. All my business will be going to U.S. Bank Altitude card
AF for green posted today, no retention offer; nor has Amex ever offered me any retention offer
none for me either.
How about you make the card have actual value and benefits instead of paying forward for a bunch of credits I don't want?
I just tried to get a retention offer on a card that just had the af post and was told they don't offer retention via chat :-(
they offered me 50k on chat. Though I was happy, but the process seems so random.
That's straight up wrong. They offered me 10k points for an EDC via chat.
I wonder what percentage of those 75% of personal Platinum holders already had their streaming or wireless bills on a Platinum. Guessing it's really high. This community might not think of it, but the average Platinum cardholder probably only has that card and uses it for everything (apart from maybe a store card here and there). We say the airline incidental credit is near-impossible to use; they say it's a nice perk when they use half of it every other year.
Unless you're a luxury traveler, it's really, really hard to get a decent value out of Membership Rewards (outside of Schwab redemption).
Almost every other card program has something for the value traveler.
I can understand the strategy behind this. Even during the pandemic, Amex gave loads of cash to hotels in exchange for zillions of points at rock bottom rates, but you have to improve the reward earnings and you have to leave something on the table for the other person in the transaction.
The American Express name once had a lot of value both from the consumer side and at the merchant end. No one could run a travel related business without accepting Amex.
But these days every provider issues metal card and every issuer now shows "Member since XXXX".
The only thing people want now is simplicity.
Apple can load a digital card into the iPhone - may be it's not exclusive and every goddamn person on earth has it - but you get cash rewards, it shows you all kinds of graphics, you don't have to jump thru hoops to redeem, the card sits right next to you all the time. People are just going to go for things like that.
Wireless/Uber credits are nice but your primary competition rolled out very simple Pay Yourself Back option. Chase isn't dumb to do this.
Anyone that likes to drive their own car probably hates the Uber credit. And it's also a measly $10 or $20 credits every month, you have to track it, in some cases it doesn't post correctly. Clearly Amex is focused on technically rolling out these rewards but imposing barriers so people that are typically not into this will just give up on tracking these constantly.
Sure, Amex is very consumer friendly in cases of purchase protection or disputed charges but most people don't go thru those things.
At some point people in the US are going to give up on Amex and for a while they can run on Asia and other developing countries because of the brand recognition. But I can't see how you can keep going at the same pace without changing the game plan.
While I broadly agree with the sentiment regarding the vanilla Platinum, I think the Amex ecosystem can still make sense for folks with either the Schwab or Morgan Stanley Plats (especially the latter if they do the CashPlus Platinum AF waiver) who can cash out MR at 1:1 or better.
Outside of the one quarter per year when Chase typically offers the rotating bonus on the Freedom, their ecosystem is pretty weak for supermarket/grocery organic spend, and that's where most Americans who aren't heavily invested in the game spend their money.
True, the Gold will require some finagling to mostly recoup the annual fee through the Uber credit, but as long as one puts forth minimal effort, you have three cards (the waived AF Morgan Stanley Plat + the Gold + BBP) that can give you 5x on airlines/hotels, 4x on groceries/restaurants, and 2x on unbonused spend for $250 AF (and that's if you value the Uber credits at zero.)