Learn, Grow, and Lead the Way with American Express Phoenix

Walter S Jackson is a seasoned executive with over 16 years of experience at American Express, currently serving as Senior Vice President of the US Client & Acquisition Group. In this role, he leads the tele-sales and account development channels, driving growth, enhancing customer experience, and improving efficiency. With a background in business development and a strong track record of delivering results, Walter brings strategic insight and leadership to his role. He holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a Bachelor's degree in Economics from Stanford University.

Caisey Jefferson Kakascik is a seasoned professional with over a decade of experience in championing diversity, equity, and inclusion. Currently serving as the Vice President of Global Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at American Express, she is dedicated to fostering an inclusive workplace culture. With a background in human resources and strategic partnerships, Caisey has a proven track record of driving impactful change within organizations.

Sanjay leads product development for Risk Products and Platforms at American Express, with responsibility for building software products that help manage credit and fraud risk across the customer lifecycle. Over the past five years, Sanjay’s team has been driving the multi-year transformation of Risk Systems from the mainframe to a modern distributed stack using big data and open-source technologies.

Sanjay has strong background and expertise in Product/Risk management, technology, and digital payments. He has held numerous roles in Risk and Product Management throughout his Amex career. Prior to Amex, he was a Data Warehousing consultant specializing in public sector projects with clients including Deloitte, Emery Worldwide, and the Singapore government.

Sanjay holds an Executive MBA from the Thunderbird School of Global Management (part of Arizona State University), and a Bachelor’s in Engineering from University of Mumbai, India.

Yvette Blake is the Vice President of Business Blueprint Sales and Revenue Operations within the Global Commercial Services organization at American Express. In this role, she oversees lending acquisitions and delivering exceptional value to small businesses.

Over the course of her career with American Express she has held positions ranging from Sales and Relationship Management to Third Party Vendor Management across the Business Blueprint, Commercial Services and Global Merchant & Network Services organizations

Yvette holds a Bachelor of Business Sciences from the University of Phoenix and an Executive MBA from Arizona State University W.P. Carey School of Business School. She is also an Executive Sponsor for the HOLA Colleague Network at American Express.

Yvette is an Arizona native. She enjoys hiking, reading and traveling (she once backpacked for 4 months) and spends as much time as possible with her 17-year-old twins and husband.

Carly Weil serves as Vice President, Operational Excellence, working to manage operational risk and overseeing monitoring across American Express’s call center operations, including conduct risk, business self-testing, and vendor oversight. Prior to this role, Carly served as Chief of Staff to two senior American Express leaders where she worked alongside senior leadership teams to provide strategic and tactical support to execute strategy, led special projects, and ensured the team met all milestones and objectives. Carly joined American Express in 2011 as an analyst and held roles of increasing responsibility in the Finance, Pricing Strategy, and Global Business Travel organizations before shifting to her current focus in risk and operations.

Before she joined American Express, Carly worked in investment banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch where she conducted origination and completion of equity and debt transactions for multinational industrial companies. Before that, Carly also spent time advising the executive leadership team of a global gaming & gambling company on their entry into several Eastern European markets as an internal consultant.

Carly holds a Master of Business Administration from Columbia Business School and a Bachelor of Arts in Russian Studies from Colgate University. A New York City native, she is based in Phoenix, AZ with her husband and their two rescue dogs. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, wine tasting, and rooting for the New York Rangers and Arizona Coyotes hockey teams.

Amanda is an electrical engineer by degree and software engineer by trade. Dynamic and intellectually curious, she has start-up to large-scale enterprise experience in domains ranging from B2B security products to Healthcare to Financials, including commercial enterprise software and DoD systems. Amanda has led several agile transformations in the last 20 years and has certified experience in project management, Scrum, business process management, Scaled Agile (SAFe Program Consultant) and Info Sec (CISSP). Amanda’s current role enables her to live out her passion for optimizing processes and solutions while growing and developing colleagues.