Director of US Digital Application Experiences, American Express

Hi, I'm Kathryn Swiniarski, I'm the Director for US Digital Card Application Experiences at American Express. Yeah, so I work on the small business side of the house. I'm really passionate about how we can bring financial tools to small businesses to help support their goals, but my role and my team specifically, we really work to make the application process as seamless as it can be and specifically trying to provide digital application processes so people can get what they need quickly, in and out, and start spending or get access to the capital they need right away. So, couple cool examples, we've been doing some work around digital provisioning to Wallet, so as soon as you apply for a card, if we approve you, you know, how can you get that right in your iPhone within five minutes versus waiting five days for us to mail you a piece of plastic. So my role really sits kind of squarely in the middle of our business and marketing teams and then our product and technology teams. So we really try to communicate what are the biggest outcomes and needs of the business and hopefully those are reflecting what are business, or what are the actual needs of our customers. And then our tech and product teams are really the experts on how to bring that to life. So I think throughout my career I've had more of a general management, operations/marketing background, but really have come to learn how to speak the languages on both sides of the house. So we have both kind of paid posts that we do across social platforms like Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn and also organic accounts that people follow. And I'll tell you they don't hesitate to tell you what they think, so I think we do capture a lot of good feedback there and then I do think the Amex customer base is one that still has this connection to the phone and to customer service and especially our larger clients actually will have kind of a representative that helps manage their account, so they have a go-to person to provide feedback. Yeah, one of our core principles is making sure we're thinking beyond our walls, so how do we keep abreast of what's going on competitively and one of the key tools we use to do that is just usability groups. So we will do, like, design thinking workshops, try to concept, you know, what if an application experience looked like this instead or what if we totally change the way people shop for products today? You know, we'll mock those up in a digital flow that we can take people through. We pay them for their time, they come in, and they provide really detailed feedback so we can at least get a pulse on it if we think we're heading in the right direction.