American Express Company

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the American Express Q4 2021 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, please press 1, then 0 on your touchtone phone. You'll hear an indication you've been placed into queue, and you may remove yourself from the queue at any time by pressing 1, then 0 again. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up the handset before pressing the numbers. Should you require assistance during the call, please press star, then zero. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to our host, Head of Investor Relations, Ms. Vivian Zhao. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Alan, and thank you all for joining today's call. As a reminder, before we begin, today's discussion contains forward-looking statements about the company's future business and financial performance. These are based on management's current expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainty. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these statements are included in today's presentation slides and in our reports on file with the SEC. The discussion today also contains non-GAAP financial measures. The comparable GAAP financial measures are included in this quarter's earnings materials as well as earnings materials for the prior periods we discussed. All of these are posted on our website at ir.americanexpress.com. We will begin today with Steve Squarey, Chairman and CEO, who will start with some remarks about the company's progress and results, and then Jeff Campbell, Chief Financial Officer, will provide a more detailed review of our financial performance. After that, we will move to a Q&A session on the results with both Steve and Jeff. With that, let me turn it over to Steve.

Thanks, Vivian, and good morning, everyone. As you saw in our press release a short while ago, we reported strong quarterly and full-year revenue growth and earnings for 2021, thanks to the efforts of our dedicated and talented colleagues around the globe. We also provided revenue and EPS guidance for 2022, and we announced a new growth plan that resets our longer-term aspirations for revenue and EPS growth to levels that are higher than what we were delivering in the years before the pandemic. I want to spend my time today talking about why these results and our progress over the last few years has me excited about the future and our aspiration to deliver higher levels of sustainable, profitable growth. As we've seen in our results for Q4 and the full year, the capabilities we've built over the past few years by investing in our customers, our brand, and our talent are helping us drive share, scale, and relevance that leads to profitable growth. And we believe that will continue as the global economy continues to improve. Our strong performance across a number of key business metrics helped deliver revenue growth of 30% in the fourth quarter and 17% for the full year. Diluted EPS for the quarter was $2.18 and $10.02 for the full year. In the near term, We expect full year revenue growth to remain at elevated levels, reaching 18 to 20% in 2022, driven by the execution of our growth plan and the recovery tailwinds we anticipate from continued improvement in the macroeconomic environment. We expect EPS of between $9.25 and $9.65 in 2022. As we think about 2023, The continuation of the recovery tailwinds could drive revenue growth in the mid-teens, which in turn should provide a platform for mid-teens EPS growth. Looking further out as we return to a more steady state economic environment, we aspire to achieve revenue growth in excess of 10% and EPS growth in the mid-teens under our new growth plan for 2024 and beyond. We've learned a lot over the past few years that we believe will help us achieve our growth plan aspirations. The business imperatives and strategies we focused on pre-pandemic, the decisions we made when COVID-19 first hit to protect our customers and colleagues, and our pivot early in the recovery cycle to ramp up investments in a number of key areas all proved to be the right moves that have been good for our business. Most importantly, our experience through this period has reinforced our conviction that investing strategically in our customers' brand and talent is absolutely critical to driving high levels of growth. We've seen that play out in the results we delivered throughout 2021. Our fourth quarter performance continued the trends we saw all year in a number of areas that are core to our growth over the long term. Spending growth reached a record quarterly high driven by continued increases in goods and services spending, which was 24% above pre-pandemic levels. Global consumer goods and services spending in the quarter grew 26% versus 2019, and we saw continued robust growth in small business B2B spending, which increased 25% over Q4 2019 levels. Overall T&E spending also continued to improve, reaching 82% of pre-pandemic levels, driven by stronger consumer travel spending. Customer retention and satisfaction continued to be very strong and remained above pre-pandemic levels. For example, retention rates in global consumer are above 98 percent. And for the second year in a row and the 11th time in 15 years, we rank first in J.D. Power's annual credit card satisfaction study of U.S. consumers. Credit performance also continued to be outstanding with key metrics near historical lows and our card members are building loan balances at a modest pace. Customer engagement with our products, services, and capabilities continued at high levels in the quarter, The strong engagement, which is fueled by our ongoing investments in value propositions, marketing, and new digital services, is helping to drive the results I just spoke about in billings and loan growth, as well as customer retention and satisfaction levels. Additionally, our customer-focused innovation strategy, which has driven increases in customer engagement, has continued to attract large numbers of new customers. New card acquisitions reached 2.7 million in Q4 last driven by strong demand for our premium fee-based products, where we saw acquisitions nearly double year over year. In consumer, millennials and Gen Z customers are driving the growth in acquisitions, representing around 60% of the new accounts we acquired globally in 2021. In commercial, Q4 closed out as one of the best years we've ever seen for U.S. SME new account acquisitions. The momentum we generated throughout 2021 further strengthens our resolve to continue our focus on the strategic imperatives we laid out back in 2018, expanding our leadership position in the premium consumer space by providing a differentiated and ever-expanding range of services and lifestyle-focused value propositions, building on our strong leadership position in commercial payments by being the key provider of payments and working capital solutions for small and medium-sized businesses, expanding our merchant network globally to give our card members more places to use their cards, and staying on the leading edge of technology and digital payment solutions to make American Express an essential part of our customers' digital lives. We are entering 2022 in a position of strength, and based on the momentum with which we exited 2021 and the opportunities we see ahead, we feel very good about the future. We believe that continuing our strategy of investing at high levels in our customers' brand and talent as we implement our growth plan will position us well as we seek to achieve our growth aspirations in 2024 and beyond. I'll now turn it over to Jeff to provide more details on our performance for the fourth quarter and our expectations for the future. And after that, we'll take your questions. Thank you, Jeff.