American Express is being investigated over sales practices. Salespeople say they have been made scapegoats.
In late May last year, some 250 salespeople at American Express learned they weren't going to get paid.
For top performers, the sudden change meant losing hundreds of thousands of dollars they had already earned by encouraging clients to use their American Express corporate credit cards. Even moderately successful salespeople lost tens of thousands of dollars. Adam Isserlis, an Amex spokesman, said the May 2022 overhaul was simply the result of a regular review of how it serves clients.
Most of the leaders of Amex's sales team have either been fired or otherwise left the company, but Amex has not placed any blame on more senior executives. Since Stephen Squeri became CEO of the credit-card giant in 2018, he has sought to tamp down some of the more freewheeling corners of the company's culture, joining with competitors across the industry to exert more control over employees working on commission.
One initiative began when Amex started working with a third party, a Canadian company called Payroll by Credit Card.through its system. Customers paid a fee, which Amex shared with its partner, and received Amex rewards points they could use on travel or other benefits, one person familiar with the program said.
The product took some time to gain traction. Though Amex salespeople played up the fact that the fee could be deducted as a business expense while the rewards could be enjoyed tax-free, the cost was still higher than the value of the points. That made it attractive to only a small segment of Amex's customers who were considered, in the words of one former salesperson,"points junkies.
The subject line of the email, which was viewed by Insider, read,"FXIP Premium Wire Update," and the first heading promoted an"Exciting Update." The email explained that the company was now changing the compensation structure so that Premium Wire would be compensated at the same level as card volume.
While regional in-person training played a part in the salespeople's education, regional and national sales calls did as well. A sample of those questions:"Are you more interested in driving profitability to your business' bottom line or increasing your own personal net worth?" Marrs, who joined Amex in September 2018, was known as a hands-on executive who had a strong command of the numbers. A spreadsheet that tracked the volumes of every product salespeople sold, including spending on various cards, working capital solutions and other loans, and Premium Wire, was known colloquially as the"Marrs Report." With the Schwab deal, salespeople were encouraged to sell more of Premium Wire.
Sales managers dialed up the pressure even more at the end of that year, encouraging salespeople to sell as much Premium Wire as they could through December 31, according to some of the people who spoke to Insider. Amex had been searching emails for specific words or sentences, said people who attended the meetings. In some cases, Amex even reached out to clients to check if scheduled meetings actually took place, according to one person.
"After a 73-day interrogation process, without ever explaining the charges against Nick or why they were justified, Amex fired him," the website reads."Williams pushed back while he was being terminated via Webex by a senior leader and friend who had been reading from a script Amex legal counsel prepared. In response, the leader continued reading from a script and offered Williams $100,000 to sign a Release of Claims and move on.
Zoerner, in the declaration for that case, says he was wrongfully terminated for whistleblowing, and an email exhibit to the declaration shows that he allegedly was owed the $42,326 in commissions that Amex withheld from him. Zoerner cited more than 30 people he knew of who had worked on Premium Wire or another product and either been fired or pushed out.
"As we stated in 2021, we discovered through internal channels that some members of a group within our SME sales organization failed to uphold our values and had positioned certain products inappropriately, specifically with respect to tax benefits," Isserlis said, repeating a statement the company issued in November of that year.
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