Stephen J. Squeri’s 2025 Chairman’s Letter to Shareholders

In the decades to follow, we continued to expand our card portfolio and enhance Membership value, launching one of the industry's first multi-airline rewards programs, Membership Miles, which later evolved into Membership Rewards®. We designed our products and services with differentiated benefits and experiences to help ensure "Membership Has Its Privileges," including leading travel and dining offerings, and exclusive access to experiences across sports and entertainment, as well as products and services that help business owners manage expenses and build their business. In the late 1990s, we also introduced the sought after Centurion® Card, an invitation only offering that continues to be the ultimate in cachet, generating many references across pop culture.

By focusing on delivering best-in-class products, services and experiences that met our customers' evolving needs, we continuously enhanced and evolved our value propositions, driving relevance across generations, customer segments, and geographies. As a result, a card that was originally printed on paper has now become an essential part of everyday lives of millions of people and businesses, and continues to grow around the world.

Another major shift we made in the mid-1990s was to embrace partnerships with other world class companies by beginning to issue cobrand cards, first with Hilton and then Delta, both of which remain important strategic partners today. We also made a push to expand merchant acceptance in locations where our customers shopped every day, including grocery stores, gas stations and drug stores. And we focused on growing our merchant network globally to be in more places where our customers live, work, and travel. To do this efficiently, we made another bold decision to allow banks to issue American Express® cards on our network and formed our Global Network Services (GNS) business in 1996 to execute our expansion strategy. GNS has been a key enabler of our growth to reach approximately 108 million merchant locations in force around the world in 2024. ⁴

Throughout the 2000s, we continued to show up for our customers, colleagues and communities during good times and bad. Following the 9/11 attacks, we pledged to keep our headquarters in lower Manhattan, a place that had been our home since shortly after our founding in 1850, and supported the neighborhood's revitalization. By the middle of the decade, we had introduced hundreds of new card products around the world, including through bank issuing partners, and continued our small business offerings with the launch of OPEN. But then, the Great Recession hit, which drove our decision to become a bank holding company to enhance our access to liquidity while we navigated the market turmoil. During this time, we made another pivotal decision to launch our retail deposit program that ultimately transformed our funding model, and accounts for over 70 percent of our overall funding today.

On the heels of the financial crisis, one of our most impactful and lasting campaigns as a company was born out of our commitment to backing our customers and communities. In 2010, we created Small Business Saturday® to help drive customer traffic and spending at struggling small businesses so they could recover and thrive again. Since its inception, this innovative campaign evolved into a year-round, global Shop Small® movement, and has generated over $223 billion in reported consumer spending at small, independent retailers and restaurants on Small Business Saturday.⁵

When COVID-19 upended every aspect of life around the world in 2020, we were once again guided by our commitment to backing our colleagues, customers, and communities. We prioritized the health and safety of our colleagues and committed to no pandemic-related layoffs in 2020 to provide them some certainty. We supported our customers by providing financial relief programs and injecting new value into our products to offer our Card Members benefits relevant to their evolving needs. We also backed impacted communities and small businesses by launching our largest Shop Small campaign to date and partnered with Hilton and Marriott to provide free hotel rooms to first responders.

Simply put, we made sure that people and businesses could rely on The Powerful Backing of American Express throughout our history.

Our focus on managing the company for the long term and backing our customers during the pandemic paid off. Since 2019, we've added millions of new premium customers to our Card Member base, more than doubled the global merchant locations in force, and significantly grew our revenue base. We continuously enhanced our premium products and value propositions, refreshing over 150 of our products around the world and adding differentiated benefits, access and experiences across travel, dining and entertainment. Our customer-focused innovations and the value enhancements over the past few years transformed our customer base, as Millennial and Gen-Z customers have become our fastest growing consumer cohort.

By consistently executing our playbook and staying true to our brand, we have evolved into the global premium financial and lifestyle company that we are today.

Looking Ahead: Long Runway for Growth & Innovation

While it is hard to summarize 175 years in one letter, it is clear that the values of trust, security, and service have been the bedrock of our company and fueled our growth throughout our history, and they will continue to do so moving forward.

Looking to the future, I am confident that we are well positioned to build on our strong foundation and drive sustained growth by continuing to deliver on our brand promise and innovate for our customers.

My confidence is driven by several factors. It starts with our differentiated business model, including our brand, global premium customer base at scale, and our network of partners. We are continuing to invest at high levels in our innovation engine, value propositions, marketing, and technology, while maintaining our excellent credit performance and expense discipline. We have many attractive growth opportunities across our customer base, particularly with Millennial and Gen Z consumers, SME customers, and in key countries outside the U.S. to build on our strong momentum.

Most importantly, we have an exceptional team of colleagues around the world who are committed to successfully executing our strategy and delivering the best customer experience every day. With this winning team building on our remarkable history of innovation, transformation and resiliency, I have no doubt that the best days of American Express lie ahead.