American Express Now Open to More Innovation Partnerships

American Express has historically focused on building their own products but the firm is now open to more partnerships to help keep up with the pace of innovation; Amex Digital Labs is responsible for driving new products and partnerships to further the organization’s digital strategy; Amex Digital Labs makes minority stakes in startups so they can explore use cases for technology, and potentially look to acquire the startups; “Five or 10 years ago, as a company, we were all about getting people to use credit cards more,” Luke Gebb, Head of Amex Digital Labs, said to Business Insider. “But now, we’re really recognizing — and this is one of the core areas of my team’s work — all the types of payments that our customers want to make that may or may not be on credit card rails,” Gebb added; the company has recently moved into non-card payments, like peer-to-peer and QR codes to pay. Business Insider.