Record money, fewer people: Amex banks its best quarter and cuts 5 percent of its staff anyway

This is what the new corporate bargain looks like, stated in one earnings release. American Express reported the strongest quarter in its history on Friday: record revenue of 20.1 billion dollars, up 9 percent on a year earlier, net income up 28 percent to 3.7 billion dollars, and billed business up 8 percent to 454 billion dollars as its affluent card members kept spending on travel and dining. Adjusted earnings of 4.68 dollars a share beat forecasts, and the company raised its full year guidance. In the same release, it booked a 336 million dollar restructuring charge to eliminate about 5 percent of its global workforce.

Five percent of roughly 78,000 employees is about 3,500 jobs, a figure chief executive Stephen Squeri confirmed on the earnings call while insisting the company has good momentum. His explanation was shape, not survival: to accelerate innovation and win over the next few years, Amex needed to become a more agile and efficient organisation. Finance chief Christophe Le Caillec filled in the mechanism, describing fewer layers of management and wider spans of control, so the company can automate more work and prepare for AI. Note the order of operations in that sentence. The layers go first. The automation is expected to absorb the work afterwards.

The money for the cuts tells its own tidy story. The restructuring charge was funded in part from a 982 million dollar gain on selling Amex's stake in its Global Business Travel venture, which is why the reported profit figure, 5.42 dollars a share, looks so much stronger than the adjusted 4.68 dollars underneath it. One asset sale paid for the quarter's glow and for the severance bill in the same stroke. Investors noticed the join: the shares fell more than 3 percent on the day, in a week when Barclays had already announced about 5,000 job cuts alongside rising profits of its own.

Two big financial firms cutting thousands of jobs in one week, neither of them in trouble, is a pattern worth naming carefully. Amex has not said AI replaced these roles, and it has not pointed to any deployed system doing the work of the people leaving. What it has said, plainly, is that a flatter company is the precondition for the AI era it expects. The jobs are being cut on a forecast, not on a result, and the forecast is doing real damage to real payrolls before it has produced a single disclosed saving.

Our call is that Amex becomes the test case other boards quietly copy or quietly avoid, depending on one number: whether billed business holds its 8 percent growth next year with 3,500 fewer people. If spending stays rich and service does not crack, every chief financial officer in the sector gets a licence to do the same, and prepare for AI becomes the standard caption under every restructuring charge. If service slips and the premium card members who fund the whole model start to feel it, this quarter gets remembered as the moment a company cut into the experience it charges a premium for. Watch the card fee line next quarter. It renews annually, and it is where unhappy affluent customers vote.