CXO INSIGHT flexible in how you ' re servicing my business ? How are you going to be more digital ? People , who ' ve all pivoted their businesses over the past 18 months are saying ‘ you need to make it easier for me to run my business ’.
One example would be tapping a card . Let ' s raise the limit on what you can tap your card on so that you can have a digital experience as a consumer . participating equally in terms of either business opportunities or the recovery speed . We launched a programme called Blueprint , where we ' ve provided 100 BIPOC entrepreneurial companies with CA $ 10,000 to finance their business , but also complemented that with a 15-week mentorship training programme in collaboration with DMZ , an incubator for startups around the world .
Another way would be our accelerated partnership with Linear Financial Technologies – a digital lending platform . We launched a solution with them because even pre-pandemic , there was a lot of criticism about how cumbersome it was to access a business loan . Linear has a market-leading digital end-to-end experience and we wanted to bring that into our customer base to enhance the servicing model to be more flexible and meet digital needs .
Most recently , we ' ve launched a podcast series called ‘ Build It Braver ’, hosted by Vivian Kay . She has 12 segments with small business owners and we also bring in someone who ' s an established successful entrepreneur to help these small business owners grow the company .
Looking ahead , what industry trends will shape your future strategy in the next 18 months ?
Another thing we did is recognise the value that people pre-pandemic might have put into a business card when you think of rewards and travel in a traditional sense . We wanted to create partnerships with computer peripherals , and we embedded those benefits into the card . So as people were making those purchases or using those services , they could get rebated back from us so in the day-to-day business they were able to manage the pressure they were feeling .
Can you talk us through your shop small campaign and any similar initiatives that encourage business for smaller customers ?
Shop Small was already a large initiative for American Express across many international markets . It ’ s a global programme encouraging Cardmembers to shop with small merchants . It ’ s recognising small business owners and how we are going to help them , consume and manage their business . We ' ve made quite a significant investment in encouraging our Cardmembers to visit all those small business owners who are so critical to the recovery of the economy . In essence , we would reward Cardmembers CA $ 5 for every time they spend CA $ 10 at a small merchant and we would GeoMap small businesses so that in your various regions you ’ d understand who the participating merchants were . Over the past two years , it ' s grown exponentially in terms of participation both on the Cardmember side and on the merchant side .
What we ' re seeing is a lot of digital experiences and solutions across a whole procure of payto-receivables channels , whether it ' s enhancing risk data , automating payments , automating receivables , making more data available to customers , we ' re seeing solution sets coming out . These solutions are built around growing your customer base as quickly as possible in terms of trying to get scale and relevance .
With all these disruptive technologies coming online , it is important to bring that together into an ecosystem and make them relevant and easy to use for customers . What we ' re trying to do at Amex , whether it ' s product development , or whether it ' s looking at partnerships , is bring this together so you can get the benefits of digitisation but also make it work from day-to-day . It ’ s bringing all these concepts under one roof .
What would be your advice to enterprises and SMEs as they plan their business strategy ?
One of the most important things that you can do is use and leverage the resources and partners around you . Many people don ' t realise the various tools that they have at their disposal . When there ' s something as simple as a card , are they maximising the unsecured loan that we happen to be giving ? Are you maximising the ability to leverage a new capability or a new service ?
If you think of the recovery , and if you think of inclusion and diversity , not every small business owner , especially in the BIPOC community , is
The people and the successful companies are integrated with their partners and the solutions that we or anyone else has to offer them . x
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