Earlier this year, Capital One completed its acquisition of Discover Financial Services, consolidating the U.S. credit card industry into the “big four”: American Express, Mastercard, Visa, and Capital One. With that in mind, we thought it would be interesting to compare these companies across human capital measures and financial performance.
Since our founding, PeopleReturn has tracked external human capital indicators—including corporate rankings, workforce indices, and anonymous employee reviews—to help clients benchmark leaders, laggards, risks, and opportunities. Research consistently shows that companies on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For and Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work deliver stronger long-term financial performance. Each of the big four has appeared on these lists multiple times, with American Express consistently ranking in the top 10 on Fortune’s list.
Similar research has shown outperformance for companies that appear on Glassdoor’s annual Best Places to Work list, which aggregates anonymous employee reviews and ranks the top 100 companies based on their score during a calendar year. Again here, each company has appeared at least twice.
Another research paper examined how changes in employee ratings correlated with changes in stock prices.
Historically, we looked at Glassdoor ratings by category taken directly from the platform, which only provided 24 months of history. This year, we expanded our analytics to incorporate more than 15 years of employee reviews across multiple platforms, leveraging both ratings and text. Our proprietary, time-weighted model allows us to track trends by geography, job title, and tenure, offering deeper insights into culture and employee experience.
Below, you’ll see how employee ratings have shifted over the past 18 months and how shareholder returns compare to the S&P 500. The data reinforces what research has long suggested: employee sentiment is a powerful predictor of long-term outperformance.
There is ample research showing employee reviews can be leveraged to build portfolios that drive significant outperformance over the long term. At PeopleReturn, we’re building models that apply NLP and AI to synthesize employee feedback, enabling clients to identify emerging risks and opportunities before they appear in the news—or in stock prices. Contact us to learn more.
What we’re reading:
- After DEI Controversies, Companies Talk Up Diversity. Hiring Tells Another Story. (Stanford GSB)
- Sustainable Switch: The fight against US anti-ESG policies (Reuters) and Judge blocks enforcement of Texas law restricting DEI and ESG advice (Reuters)
- Human Capital as a Competitive Advantage (Sands Capital)
- Vanguard supported no E&S proposals at US firms in 2025 proxy year (Responsible Investor)
- Sustainability Reports – are they Dying or Evolving? (Sustainability Magazine)
- Beyond the backlash: Why LGBTQ+ inclusion still drives economic performance (IMD)
- The Great Rebalancing: How US Companies Are Reframing DEI in Response to Anti-ESG Pressure (Datamaran)