You arrive at a slick office block near Victoria in central London and wait in reception for a few minutes before being directed up to the umpteenth floor to meet the boss of the European arm of one of the world’s most powerful financial services companies. You straighten your tie in anticipation. Then a man wearing an open-necked white cheesecloth shirt rolled up at the sleeves and a black woollen tank top strolls up to you with a big friendly smile and holds out his hand. “Hi, I’m Peter Godfrey. It’s all a bit informal today. It’s dress-down Friday. We don’t go in for status symbols here.”

Dispensing with suits and ties once a week in favour of casual dress, an idea imported from the US and now followed by many British companies, is almost a way of life at American Express. At the company’s UK headquarters in Sussex it goes on all year. There, everyone dresses informally unless they’re meeting clients.

As with many people who have risen to important positions in the business world, Godfrey, president of American Express Europe, Middle East and Africa, has a relaxed, confident manner that immediately puts you at ease. He laughs and jokes and wouldn’t know a high horse if it kicked him in the shins.

But appearances are, of course, deceptive. “It was a tough night last night,” he says, rubbing his eyes, meaning not that he was at a smart dinner where the wine flowed freely into the small hours, but that he was having a two-hour telephone conference until around midnight with counterparts in American Express’s operations in Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York, Buenos Aires and most of the other corners of the globe. “You take the rough with the smooth,” acknowledges Godfrey, who joined the company in 1997. “Last time it was the Japanese who had to take the calls at four in the morning. I was in the office all day yesterday, then I had to make a speech, host a dinner then get back here to join the telephone conference. But that’s the job.”

It’s not like that every day. If there’s nothing on in the evening, he says, he likes to get home to his family by about 8pm. But it’s clear that underneath the relaxed exterior is a dedicated, hard-working individual who didn’t get to where he is today just by being Mr Nice Guy.

Godfrey’s beginnings were humble enough. He left school at 15 because of straitened finances in his family and went to work for holiday operator Thomas Cook as an office boy. Just four years later he found himself in his first management job as a section leader. At the same time, he went to night school to catch up on his education and get to grips with business studies.

This led, at the age of 20, to a job at British Rail’s centre in Watford as an organisation and methods assistant, where he had to take a rather old-fashioned time and motion approach to analysing work.

This was an exciting time, when computers were beginning to appear and Godfrey decided to get into industry. He joined Ready Mixed Concrete, where he was charged with making big improvements in productivity, which he claims to have achieved in just one year. He tells how, as a fresh-faced 22-year-old, he was packed off to quarries in mid-Wales to knock on the boss’s door and announce that he had come to find ways of improving productivity. “I certainly learned a thing or two that year,” he says with a smile.

The next career stop was banking, when Godfrey joined Williams and Glyn’s Bank, now part of Royal Bank of Scotland, and stayed for 14 years. His tasks included installing one of the first videoconferencing systems in the UK to enable people in London and Glasgow to communicate more effectively. He is obviously proud of his achievements at this time, but the disarmingly honest Godfrey admits there was a simpler motive for the move: “They had good football and cricket teams. They saw it as a good way of keeping the staff happy. That’s the real reason I joined them.”

Then Midland Bank invited Godfrey to join, just as the recession of the early 1980s was beginning to hit the banking sector hard. He took a leading role in several major projects, including the sale of Access to MasterCard, which, he recalls, was “quite good fun”.

So to his current role at American Express, one of several major companies that sought his services a couple of years ago. “The brand is powerful,” he says. “It’s a truly global company. The job has given me the chance to find out what it was like managing people in several different countries. I was lucky to be offered such a fascinating opportunity.”

It wasn’t hard, discussing the interview with Godfrey and his PR minders beforehand, to identify the main issue facing American Express. It’s the same issue facing every major company, especially in the banking sector, and filling the pages of almost every business publication: e-commerce.

Internet revolution

Did he and his colleagues feel a twinge of apprehension, just for a nanosecond, when the Internet burst upon the scene three or four years ago and just about everything, including bank accounts, started going online? “More than a nanosecond,” admits Godfrey. “Many traditional companies were caught on the hop by the opportunities opened up by e-commerce. There were a number of things it took us a while to understand.”

Now, though, Godfrey and his colleagues have taken e-commerce by the horns and are launching several online ventures, most of which will hit the US first, but will be coming to Europe before long.

Like others in “old economy” businesses, American Express has, says Godfrey, realised that it has strengths in the electronic world that the new Internet start-ups don’t have, such as buildings, people, reputation, commercial experience and know-how that stretches back for decades.

“It took us time to galvanise ourselves, but now we’re up with the best of them. E-commerce is critical to our future,” says Godfrey. “We’re investing significant money in the development of e-commerce, both for the business-to-consumer market and the business-to-business market. It’s not difficult for us to get the technology up and running. And the advantage is that the customer can feel confident that the service they’re getting is backed by American Express.”

The company he now works for has, says Godfrey, an open, honest culture and is relentlessly results orientated. More than anything, he says, it’s good at communicating with its staff. He’s learning French, so that he can communicate better with some of his colleagues on the continent, even though most of them probably speak fluent English. “This company functions through its staff,” he says. “Employee satisfaction is crucial.”

It all fits in with his philosophy of how a successful company works. “If you offer your customers good service they will stay with you and that generates revenue. Shareholders are then happy with the return on their investment, so they’re likely to invest more and create opportunities for the staff. And contented staff will be happy to offer good service to the customers. It goes round in a circle.”

At a meeting of the South East branch group of CIPS, Godfrey shows his dynamic public face. Facing an audience of purchasing and supply management professionals at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, his approach is challenging, almost accusatory.

“If your chief executive does not know more about the Internet than you, then your company will be in big trouble in five years’ time,” he says, jabbing a finger at his audience. “If the people running your company don’t understand what’s happening to us all, you’ll have problems. I promise you life will change dramatically in the next five years. If you don’t re-engineer yourselves, someone else will come along and do it for you.”

Then, in a complete about-turn, the humour returns. “You’ve had a hard day,” he says, “and I’ve had a hard day. Tonight I’m flying to Zurich. Let’s all smile. There’s nothing wrong with smiling!”

It’s the two sides of Godfrey the people manager: by turns demanding and critical, then charming and slightly off the wall. You wouldn’t want to be across the table from him in a disciplinary hearing, because you can see that he is respected by his people, probably liked, certainly powerful.

And the challenges ahead? American Express is obviously a tough company with its roots in a far more ruthless business culture than the UK’s. “I never wonder about what’s going to happen next,” he says. “I always focus on what I’m doing now. My current ambition is to fulfil this year’s plan. It doesn’t keep me awake at night, but it does get me up early in the morning.”