“You can see, based off our third quarter results that we are tracking with our expectation for operating expenses to be around $13 billion for the full year.”

In context

“third quarter, on track with our expectation to spend over $5 billion in 2022. We feel really good about the strong demand of card acquisitions, especially premium card acquisitions as we showed on Slide 15. And more importantly, we feel good about the spend, credit and revenue profiles of the customers we are bringing into American Express membership, which continue to look strong relative to what we saw pre-pandemic. Moving to the bottom of Slide 18 brings us to operating expenses, which were $3.3 billion in the third quarter, essentially flat to last quarter. As Steve and I have both discussed all year, these results reflect the impact inflation has had on our operating expenses, in addition to our investments in other key growth underpinnings to support our tremendous revenue growth. You can see, based off our third quarter results that we are tracking with our expectation for operating expenses to be around $13 billion for the full year. And looking at the year-over-year OpEx growth of 22% this quarter, it is also important to note that we see an impact from the prior year, including a sizable benefit from net mark-to-market gains in our Amex Ventures strategic investment portfolio, while this year we saw a modest impairment charge. More generally, we continue to see operating expenses as a key source of leverage moving forward, and we'd expect to have far less growth in OpEx than revenues in our ambitious growth plan. Turning next to capital on Slide 19. We returned $1 billion of capital to our shareholders in the third quarter, including common stock repurchases of $600 million and $391 million in common stock dividends on the back of strong earnings generation. Our CET1 ratio was 10.6% at the end of the third quarter,”