- AXP
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American Express Group president of global commercial services, Raymond Joabar, sits down with Yahoo Finance Senior Business Reporter Ines Ferré to explain how AmEx is bringing payments, expenses, and AI into one business platform.
Walk us through the problem that you guys were hearing and the solution that you’re coming up with. What are the tools?
What Amex Corporate is is just a fundamentally different way to transform and streamline how companies uh manage their their financial operations. So we come up with some uh uh new intelligent expense management software, a new cashback card program for it, agentic tools to streamline the automated and automate some of the processes, all backed on the one platform.
And is this for small businesses, medium-sized businesses, larger what which ones?
Well, we serve all three segments, but these tools are really designed for mid-sized companies, companies that would have let’s say anywhere from $5 million of revenue up to maybe $300 million of revenue and maybe 10 to 10 employees up to 500 employees. As companies grow, their needs become a little more complicated. That’s where the financial side of the running their operations, seeing who’s spending the money, how they’re spending it and making sure it fits within their the policies.
You also have a survey that shows that these mid-sized companies I mean, this is what they want. 92% of mid-sized businesses are trying to consolidate their expense tools right now. Uh and so are you now positioning yourself as sort of we can do this all for you. This is the all-in-one hub?
That’s right. That’s right. They want it on one platform and what we have today is a consolidated great card program, expense management software, agentic tools and we’ll be adding more and more agentic tools to streamline a lot of the administrative side of running their financial operations, but also bring bringing along some other features and products like accounts payable, the way in which they pay their vendors. The benefits of these products are twofold. One, it helps the streamline the financial operations so that they can more simply, um, for example, a lot of finance teams take a lot of the data, download it in a spreadsheets and analyze it. These tools now allow them to with some of our agentic agents, real time analyze the data uh from where their employees are spending, and they they can eliminate a lot of the extra routines that they had to go through. The other way that this helps companies is, say you’re a salesperson and you have to fill out your expense reports. If you’re a salesperson, you’re what you really want to do is find new customers and eliminated much of the administrative process of filling out your expense reports, remembering where your receipts are. A lot of times when uh employees go out, they don’t know how much they can spend for a business meal. They don’t know how much they can spend on hotels. These agentic tools help them understand, they can query verbally or look it up uh through the agentic tool and say, what can I do on this type of transaction? Is it within the policy? Let’s say a salesperson goes out and takes an Uber to go and then has a business meal. Um, what the agency can do is classify an Uber transaction as a travel expense and a a meal as a business meal so that it simplifies the filing of that expense report. We have a new mobile app, so all they have to do is press a couple of buttons, they approve the transaction in real time. If it needs to be approved or if they need to add receipts, the agent will route it appropriately to the right person. It’s really tailored to way the company wants to ran run their expense management process.
