American Express’s UK boss, Hannah Lewis, sits down with City AM to talk breaking into a younger markets and shaking up its image . “Do you take Amex?” It’s a question that has slipped so far into the cultural lexicon there are even memes about it. Scroll through a dedicated Reddit page on American Express and you’ll find users joking about the type of people who like to ask it: one cartoon shows a shopper deliberately shouting the question so loud the rest of the shop will hear; another offers a “starter pack” of accessories that might come alongside it (a flashy white jeep and luxury handbag make the list).
It is a hangover from a time when an Amex card was a yuppie symbol of status and power in the late 20th century, immortalised as Patrick Bateman’s card of choice in American Psycho. But fast forward 30 years, and it’s one from which Amex is understandably keen to distance itself. And Hannah Lewis, the Yorkshire-born boss of the credit and payments firm‘s UK arm, insists it’s a world away from reality.
“I think the old world of just having it for showing it off...
maybe there’s a population that works like that, but I think increasingly it’s actually ‘look at the incredible things I get with this card’,” she tells City AM at the company’s UK headquarters in Victoria. Lewis, a 16-year veteran who took over as UK managing director in 2022, has been trying to forge new ground for the payments firm which began life as a US shipping business.