American Express Business Insights, a global information, analytics and consulting company, leverages the power and reach of American Express’ information capabilities to help business customers develop better-informed strategies to grow.

American Express Business Insights, a global information, analytics and consulting company, leverages the power and reach of American Express’ information capabilities to help business customers develop better-informed strategies to grow. The unique ability to draw upon data from both the American Express merchant network and card member information allows Business Insights to take a holistic approach to analytics.

Unlike survey-based companies, we have real transaction information so we know how much consumers are spending, and where. The organisation identifies strategic opportunities drawn from the aggregate spending patterns of about 90 million cards in force in almost 130 countries, and works with business clients to provide data-driven insights focused on specific customer segments.

Leveraging our expertise with consumers and merchants, we examined customer behaviour over the past several years in a variety of sectors including supermarket, apparel, department stores, luxury retail, electronics and jewellery across the UK to understand consumer behaviour as we emerge from recession. Our findings are consistent with what we have heard in the news:

  • We observed year-on-year decreases across many sectors, but 2009 was an especially challenging year for retail.
  • However, as we entered the period covering December 2009 to February 2010, we observed significant improvement in spend trends versus the entire aggregate August 2009 to February 2010 time period.
  • As of February 2010, restaurants are still down 3% year-on-year, while supermarkets are holding positive as consumers may be shifting spend from dining out to cooking at home.
  • Luxury retail, jewellery and department stores have rebounded faster since August 2009. Importantly, we see shifts in spend from specialty to department stores.

From December 2009 through February 2010, we observed a shift to positive trending across all sectors and in some cases, dramatic improvements.

Nadine Davey-Rogers is vice-president of American Express Business Insights

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