American Express’ recent technology investments include product development and tech stack enhancements. 

In the second quarter of 2023, the financial institution increased expenses 23% year over year to $402 million, according to its earnings supplement, with the increase primarily driven by higher technology costs.

The $245 billion financial institution’s tech focus continued into the third quarter as it selected new technologies to integrate, according to BuiltWith, a business intelligence tool that tracks technology adoption and use.  

BuiltWith reports that, since August, American Express has added the following technologies to its tech stack: 

• Qualtrics Site Intercept: American Express started using Qualtrics Site Intercept feedback forms and surveys in August to give insight into client needs. The company has been using data integration platform Qualtrics since November 2021. Synchrony Financial and Santander Bank also use Qualtrics’ survey capabilities. 
• Wirecard: Payments processer Wirecard was first detected on American Express’ website in September. Wirecard is active on 49,961 websites. 
• OpenTelemetry: American Express started using OpenTelemetry, a collection of APIs and SDKs used to track website metrics, in August to track its application performance. OpenTelemetry is active on 6,334 websites. 

Investing in tech

As the FI leverages third-party technology, it announced last week that it is rolling out biometric security capabilities to its own solution, SafeKey, which monitors transactions for fraudulent activity, according to an AmEx release. 

“We’re hyper-focused on fraud prevention,” JJ Kieley, vice president of digital identity and commerce experiences at AmEx, told Bank Automation News. 

Alongside the significant increase in digital commerce and e-commerce transactions of the past decade, fraud attacks are becoming more targeted and sophisticated, he said. 

American Express’ SafeKey is built on 3D Secure technology that flags transactions as low, medium or high risk, Kieley said. The solution was developed using technology from FIDO Alliance and World Wide Web Consortium. 

Kieley said merchants can now authenticate transactions through SafeKey with one-time passcodes, push notifications and the latest addition to the service: biometric identification through facial and fingerprint recognition.  

SafeKey biometric validation is currently in pilot phase with a planned rollout for early 2024, he said.