American Express Work Values

Daily Duties at American Express:

When first hired as a business analyst was part of the MIS group. responsibilities were to collect and distribute reporting to each operations team so they could do their work each day. compile reports for operations management to show previous days/weeks/months work. when necessary would start the reporting run in the morning so the reporting would be complete when the staff arrived. Worked with the programmers to develop reporting as requested by the business. Was often used as a subject matter expert due to my work with the processing system and time in operations. after 8 months was moved to the performance engineering team. responsibilites in the PE team included working with operations on setting productivity measures for the different processes, analysis of the process and working with the technology, rules, credit risk, marketing, fraud risk, operations and compliance groups to implement the changes to reduce cost, improve system processing, reduce credit and fraud risk. worked as a subject matter expert and analyst for the project managers. required that I analyzed the reporting data for cost benefit and size impacts, report those findings and track them after implementation to realize savings/costs. in the end of 2000, the PE team was combined with the project management office and my title was changed to Sr Project Analyst. my duties remained the same but worked on different projects as assigned rather than more self-directed - though both were done. some of the main projects I worked on were to improve system decisioning on applications. I worked with the above groups as well as an outside consulting group to implement the changes and define the metrics for system processing. this resulted in an increase of 15 percentage points in the system processing metric. Leading to lower cost due to less staff needed and increased revenue for getting the card to the consumer in a more timely manner. Another project I was part of was moving the on-line help to a web based platform. For this project I had to review all existing proceedures for accuracy, completeness and relevancy. all outdated proceedures were eliminated after review by internal control, credit risk and fraud risk. many proceedures were re-written to be more understandable. processes were grouped to make them easier to find and links were identified to make movement within the system easier. The end users of the help system were able to find information more quickly thereby getting their work completed faster. another major project I was involved in was building a GUI interface for the mainframe application processing system. I was part of gathering, documenting and reviewing business requiements for the project, helped in gathering data to secure funding, design screens, review the process flow for a more smooth and quick process, UAT the development and provide data for tracking the Cost improvements of the project. Other responsibilities were to devlop a Key Metrics report for the business. These metrics were volume inputs, rates by decision type (approval/decline), aging of volume and timeliness of decision, customer satisifaction survey results, fraud rates and losses, quality of process and compliance, System vs non-system processing rates. The report gave them month over month, year over year for 3 years worth of data. Worked with mangement to determine what metrics would be included, how much detail would be given. Then worked with the MIS team to build reports and format them for ease of use. Then each month I would compile the reports into one document and gather non-automated metrics from various groups and distribute the report to operations and sr management throughout the company. Periodically a review was done to ensure the reports were correct or there were no data issues. For the last 3 1/2 years of my employment, I worked on the Business Intelligence projct for the New Accounts department. This was to move the flatfile data where each report was a request to the MIS team and took several weeks to fulfil to a multi-dementional data storage where the reports were built by the end user. This required that I work with the MIS team on site as well as the technology datawarehouse team in another center. I was part of the decisioning group on what data to move in what order and why. I would test the data from the source, the new elements in the new BI system and the objects built for the reporting. Reviewed each data element and compare usage and reporting needs, source data, name for each data element and any metrics that would be needed using that data. the first phase of implementation moved 200 data elements and created ~2,000 report objects for the end users. 6-7 additional data groups were implemented prior to my layoff and all additional data was completed through analyze and ready for design/build phases. I worked with the company that developed the business intelligence software to revise the end user training to include example data relevant to the business. This allowed the end users to better understand the new reporting system. Then conducted 80-90% of the enduser classroom training the report data and numerous side-by-side sessions to help the business transition. Designed and built a realtime dashboard to replace the Key Business Metrics report, a 200 page excel report the business used to track how the business was doing. The new dashboard was an interactive on-line report that combined graphical representation of the metrics with more up to date data. This gave the management more timely data on which to make decisions for operations and reduced cost of compiling and printing the old report.

What they like about American Express:

The social vibrance of a hiring firm is very important to you. Your ability to make and maintain friendships there is a critical part of your decision. You would likely be dissatisfied with a workplace that is quiet, cold, or otherwise not particularly social. When you investigate a new hiring company, ask recruiters, managers, and potential co-workers about the social life and opportunities there. This is especially important when you are relocating; moving dramatically alters your social sphere both inside and outside the workplace.

Tags

gather business requirements, data analysis, end user training, process mapping/improvement, system and data testing/validation, report and dashboard design and build, performance/business metrics development, Project Analyst, Salt Lake UT

Skills

P&L responsibilities, Presentation, Software Implementation, Leadership

These are some of the questions we asked our climbers about their experiences with American Express: