American Express Company (NYSE:AXP) Q2 2024 Earnings Conference Call July 19, 2024 8:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Kartik Ramachandran - Head of Investor Relations
Stephen Squeri - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Christophe Le Caillec - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Ryan Nash - Goldman Sachs
Donald Fandetti - Wells Fargo
Sanjay Sakhrani - KBW
Craig Maurer - FT Partners
Richard Shane - JPMorgan
Jeffrey Adelson - Morgan Stanley
Mark DeVries - Deutsche Bank
Cristopher Kennedy - William Blair
Terry Ma - Barclays
Saul Martinez - HSBC
Moshe Orenbuch - TD Cowen
Mihir Bhatia - Bank of America

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the American Express Q2 2024 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today's call is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to our host, Head of Investor Relations, Mr. Kartik Ramachandran. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Kartik Ramachandran

Thank you, Donna, and thank you all for joining today's call. As a reminder, before we begin, today's discussion contains forward-looking statements about the company's future business and financial performance.

These are based on management's current expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these statements are included in today's presentation slides and in our reports on file with the SEC.

The discussion today also contains non-GAAP financial measures. The comparable GAAP financial measures are included in this quarter's earnings materials as well as the earnings materials for the prior periods we discussed. All of these are posted on our website at ir.americanexpress.com.

We will begin today with Steve Squeri, Chairman and CEO, who will start with some remarks about the company's progress and results. And then Christophe Le Caillec, Chief Financial Officer, will provide a more detailed review of our financial performance. After that, we'll move to a Q&A session on the results with both Steve and Christophe.

With that, let me turn it over to Steve.

Stephen Squeri

Good morning, and thanks for joining us. As you saw in our earnings release issued a short time ago, we reported strong second quarter results and raised our EPS guidance for the full year, based on the continued momentum we're seeing in our core business.

Revenue in the quarter reached an all-time high and earnings grew 44% year-over-year or 21% after excluding the gain of $0.66 we realized from the sale of Accertify. The strong performance of our core business year-to-date and our expectations for the balance of the year will enable us to increase our investments in marketing and other strategic areas that drive our growth without using any of the proceeds from the Accertify sale, while still delivering exceptional earnings results.