Here's what Amex's CEO had to say about expectations for the rest of the year

Yahoo Finance's Brian Sozzi breaks down the latest comments from the American Express CEO following the company's latest earnings.

Video transcript

- Welcome back to "Yahoo Finance". American Express out with earnings this morning, and if it's continuing the theme that we've seen some other financial services companies seems like they should have also had a blowout quarter. Again, you can see the numbers there they did beat on both the top and bottom lines.

But Brian Sozzi, you spoke with the CEO of American Express after their earnings release. What were the big takeaways for the quarter?

BRIAN SOZZI: Yeah, it was good to catch up with Amex's CEO Stephen Squeri this morning before I came here. Really, takeaways are these: One, card member spending amongst millennials and Gen Z or folks like many of us out there, those sales are up 38% over third quarter 2019 levels, excluding the impact of currency. The company acquired 2.6 million new proprietary cards in the third quarter.

Now Squeri's really pointing to just improvements in the benefits or perks to that new platinum card, which recently got a price increase to, I believe, $695 as helping to drive a lot of those new sales amongst millennials and Gen Z. Also talking about goods and services, spending on the card from that perspective remains very strong.

A little more mixed in terms of demand in travel and business and even entertainment spending. I'm not surprised. We did hear travel remains somewhat mixed with the airlines reporting this week-- the airlines were a little more mixed. American Express seeing that from their perspective as well.

But overall, I asked him how the holiday season was shaping up to be a lot of concerns about supply chain, bottlenecks, and how consumers might react to inflation. Squeri telling me that the holiday outlook is looking pretty strong, saying, quote, "So I think we're going to have a strong holiday season. I think it'll be more even this year than last year. We saw a pull forward last year, and I don't think you're going to see that."

So overall, I think a very good quarter from Amex doing the stock pop over 5%. Very much, I would say, well-deserved here.

- Yeah, and you can actually see it up about 5% to $186.50 on shares of American Express AXP right there.