American Express has taken the difficult decision to close down its call centres for business travel, costing around 4,000 jobs throughout the globe. This amounts to 6% of Amex’s workforce worldwide but should help the company achieve its target savings of $800 million.

American Express is hoping to save $175 million through cutting employment figures and saving $500 million on marketing.

Kenneth Chenault is the CEO of Amex, he added:

While we have remained solidly profitable at a time when some parts of the card industry were incurring substantial losses, we continue to be very cautious about the economic outlook and are therefore moving forward with additional reengineering efforts to help further reduce our operating costs. We believe these efforts will put us in a better position to remain profitable and free up some additional resources that will be reinvested in the business to make sure we can take competitive advantage of opportunities as the economy begins to rebound.

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