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.
