Good morning, everyone. Thanks for coming and welcome to our 2024 Investor Day. Our focus for today is to demonstrate why we are confident in our ability to deliver on our aspiration of 10%+ annual revenue growth and mid-teens EPS growth on a sustainable basis. I'll start by laying out four key factors why we believe our growth aspiration is the right one for American Express. First, we're in a growth industry and we enjoy leadership positions in the most attractive customer segments. We have a differentiated global business model with a number of sustainable competitive advantages. We have executed a strategy that has transformed our business over the past six years, which has increased our scale and growth potential.
Finally, we have demonstrated a history and a culture of constant innovation enabling us to attract a large number of new premium customers and increase engagement with existing customers. Opportunities in the global payment space continue to be significant, with global card revenues expected to grow at 7% annually. Account growth in the U.S. premium consumer segment, which is where we excel, is expected to be twice the rate of the industry overall, with Millennial and Gen Z consumer accounts expected to grow at an even faster pace. On a small business front, while billings growth slowed across the industry last year, as the category leader, we are poised to take advantage of the opportunities in this space as growth recovers. Finally, international continues to represent a significant opportunity.
While this is the fastest growing part of our business, we currently have, on average, only 6% spend share in our top five countries, giving us a long runway to continue our accelerated growth outside the U.S. These growth opportunities in areas where we are already well positioned give us the confidence that we can continue our revenue momentum over the longer term. As I've said before, our global differentiated business model provides the foundation that propels our growth. Starting on the left, for 174 years, the American Express brand has stood for trust and security, two enduring qualities that are earned, not manufactured, and that resonate with customers globally. At the core of our branded promise is our colleagues' dedication to service excellence, which has resulted in our ranking number one in customer satisfaction among U.S. credit card companies by J.D. Power.
Power 13 times out of the last 17 years, as well as receiving numerous awards outside the U.S. Another key advantage is our unique membership model, with what we believe are the best value propositions in the industry. The many benefits that come with American Express membership build a strong emotional connection with our brand across generations and geographies. As our membership model has evolved, we've innovated beyond our traditional travel and entertainment strengths into differentiated lifestyle services for consumers and business-centric solutions for our commercial customers. We have a premium global customer base that is unmatched in the industry and is highly attractive to our partners who contribute additional value to our membership model. Our global network, supported by state-of-the-art technology, gives us end-to-end relationships with card members and merchants.
This provides us with data and analytics that deliver differentiated value to our customers, industry-leading fraud, credit, and servicing capabilities, and the ability to provide higher spend capacity to our customers while maintaining our best-in-class credit metrics. The key factor that drives all aspects of our business is our talented and dedicated colleagues. Over the last six years, we've focused on building scale and momentum by investing at high levels in key strategic areas. By successfully executing this strategy, we have significantly transformed our business, becoming a larger, stronger, and more resilient company than we were pre-pandemic, with continued strong growth potential going forward. Starting on the upper left of this slide, our strategy of investing in refreshing and enhancing the value of our premium products on a regular basis has helped us attract millions of new customers with even better credit quality and higher spend than pre-pandemic.
In 2023, over 60% of new consumer accounts globally came from Millennials and Gen Zs. These customers represent a higher potential lifetime value because we can grow with them over time as their needs and interests evolve. The strong demand for our premium products and the resulting growth in scale have enabled us to increase our marketing investments. Moving to the lower left of this slide, we've also significantly increased merchant coverage globally. We've been at virtual parity coverage in the U.S. for several years now. This has helped us to grow our share of wallet with our customers, particularly newer ones who never experienced coverage gaps. In addition, we're rapidly closing coverage gaps in key countries and cities outside the U.S. Our disciplined credit and risk management capabilities have enabled us to widen the gap between our best-in-class credit metrics and those of other issuers.
And the growth of our successful retail deposit program has created a large, stable source of funding that now covers over 70% of the company's funding needs. Also driving the transformation of our business are the investments we're making in upgrading our technology capabilities and backing our colleagues. As a result, we've created substantial momentum, accelerating our revenue growth and EPS to levels significantly higher on average these past two years than at any time over the last 13 years. This chart shows that momentum. In much of the 2010s, we delivered average annual revenue growth of around 6%, increasing to around 9% per year in the few years just prior to the pandemic, which is when we first embarked on our strategy of investing to drive scale, share, and relevance in our core business.
Following the COVID disruption, we've increased momentum and delivered revenue growth that has averaged 19% a year. In fact, in the last two years, total revenues have grown 40% from $42 billion to about $61 billion. This acceleration of our revenue growth has also led to an increase in EPS driven by our operating leverage generated by our model. Importantly, as we've transformed and grown our business, we continue to make significant investments in strengthening our risk capabilities and our control and compliance programs as we strive to deliver on our promise to our customers and effectively manage the risks our business is exposed to. Critical to our brand's long history of success and a key driver of our momentum these last several years is our consistent focus on innovation.
From our early days inventing the Travelers Cheques as a trusted form of payment to creating an entire suite of premium credit cards that resonate the world over, from Green to Gold to Platinum to Centurion to Corporate and small business cards, throughout our history, we've created entire new categories of products and services by listening to our customers and anticipating their needs. This slide highlights just some of the many industry-leading innovations we've introduced since launching our first American Express card 66 years ago. Let me highlight just a few of them. Membership Rewards was a breakthrough innovation that started in 1991 as a loyalty program offering redemptions for travel with multiple airline partners. Since then, we've continued to innovate the program by expanding rewards categories and creating new redemption channels like Pay with Points.
Our Buy Now, Pay Later capability, known as Plan It, gives our consumer card members the ability to decide if they want to pay in full or pay in installments for a specific purchase. The no-preset spending limit we feature on our premium cards gives our card members higher spend capacity and peace of mind, which drives high levels of spending and loyalty. Our tradition of innovation has not been limited to products and services. To help small businesses recover from the lingering effects of the Great Financial Crisis, in 2010, we created Small Business Saturday, a U.S.-based campaign that soon became a global movement to support small businesses and shine a spotlight on their importance in the world economy. As these examples show, we have consistently delivered product innovations over time that help to enhance and differentiate American Express membership.
Our commitment to listening to our customers and doubling down on enhancing the value of American Express membership is what's driving our momentum. As you'll hear in the presentations that follow, we'll maintain our focus on investing in our membership model globally. In 2024, we'll continue to innovate our value propositions with approximately 40 product refreshes planned around the world. As we do so, we'll also innovate with our partners, such as Delta, Hilton, British Airways, and others, as well as working with our merchant partners globally to continue to drive customer engagement. At the same time, we'll continue to strengthen our capabilities, investing in innovative technologies such as generative AI, maintaining a strong focus on risk management and operational excellence, transforming servicing, enhancing our core systems, and delivering cutting-edge digital and personalized customer experiences.
In summary, there are four key factors that will enable us to achieve our growth aspiration: a strong runway for growth in the most attractive industry segments where we excel, a differentiated business model built around membership, the continued successful execution of our strategy, and a history and a culture of innovation. These four factors fuel a virtuous cycle of growth that we are confident that we can sustain. It starts with offering industry-leading, innovative value propositions that enable us to attract and retain large numbers of premium customers. These premium customers attract a growing network of merchants and partners who add more value to our membership offerings. As the value of American Express membership grows, it enables us to attract even more premium customers who attract more merchants and partners, which further drives scale.
This scale enables us to generate more investment dollars and drives operating leverage in our membership model, which enables us to inject even more value into our products and services and makes it even more difficult for our competitors to catch up. Our demonstrated ability to drive this virtuous cycle of growth is why we remain committed to pursuing our growth aspiration of delivering 10%+ annual revenue growth and mid-teens EPS growth on a sustainable basis. For the remainder of the morning, the heads of our core businesses will provide the details on how we plan to achieve our growth aspiration. Christophe will then provide an overview of our financial strategy to help answer the question of why you should continue to invest in American Express, and we'll finish the day with a Q&A session. Now I'll turn it over to Howard Grosfield, head of our U.S.
Consumer business, for our first business presentation.
Good morning and welcome. I'm delighted to be here today to provide an update on the U.S. consumer business and our unique membership model. My hope is that you'll take four key things away from the presentation today. First, our membership model and innovation are the driving force behind our strong performance and leadership position in the premium segment. Second, the model delivers four powerful outcomes that we will cover today that are not only differentiated in our industry, they are difficult to replicate. Third, it's a proven strategy that has a track record of delivering strong results and momentum, and it has widened our leadership position. And finally, fourth, the premium segment remains very attractive, plays to our strengths, and has a long runway for growth. So with these in mind, we've organized the presentation to answer three questions.
First, what is our differentiated membership model? Second, how do we execute and innovate to deliver on this model? And finally, why is there a long runway for growth? So let's start with question one. As you can see from the left side of the page, our model has three core components, and they are designing best-in-class premium payment products, a powerful set of highly differentiated membership services like travel, dining, lounges, and offers, and building world-class partnerships and working with great brands to co-create, co-fund superior benefits for our card members. But the key to our strategy is how we combine these components, as you can see on the right side of the page. We start by wrapping our great card products in benefits and services that are unlocked by membership.
Partnerships, as I will discuss in more detail later on, serve to strengthen our differentiation by delivering unique benefits that are embedded in our products, like statement credits for Disney+, ESPN , or The Wall Street Journal, or a free breakfast and a late checkout at your favorite hotel or access to that hard-to-get table at your favorite restaurant. Now I'm going to come back and talk in more detail about the three components on the left side and how we bring them to life in the next section. But first, I want to talk about the four powerful outcomes this membership model delivers that differentiate us from our competitors and are difficult to replicate.
They are, one, a highly attractive global premium customer base across generations and geographies. Two, a diversified and subscription-like revenue model. Three, superior credit quality and performance. And finally, four, superior loyalty and engagement with our global brand. Let's start with number one. By far, one of the most powerful outcomes of our membership model is our attractive and engaged premium customer base, which is unmatched in our industry. Our customers spend a combined $1.5 trillion per year across 80 million cards in force, which can be used in 202 countries and territories. They're high spending, high income, high credit quality, high margin, and high discretionary spending consumers, which makes them extremely attractive to our strategic partners. A big part of how we built this global premium customer base is our approach to product design.
Our cards are built to attract premium customers at scale, and they deliver subscription-like membership fees and benefits that we refresh every few years. As you can see from this slide, we have a strong track record of success with this strategy across our products in the U.S. and around the world. When we refresh, innovate, add value, and raise the fee to reflect that value, we've seen demand accelerate. We're also able to test and share insights across countries, including things like price points for membership fees, which, as you can see from the international examples on the right, are higher than they are in the U.S. In many ways, this premium product design strategy helps deliver a diversified revenue model that is unique to our competitors' buy, generating significantly higher average annual fees and annual spend versus competitors.
As you can see on the far right, our revenue model is the opposite of the top five issuers in the U.S. and delivers important advantages. We benefit from a more stable and recurring fee revenue. We are less lend-dependent, and our spend revenue naturally hedges with our rewards costs. All of these advantages provide flexibility and an ability to pivot quickly, especially during challenging economic environments. The third powerful advantage of our membership model is superior industry-leading credit quality and performance. There are two points about this advantage that I want to make here. The first is on the left side of the slide. Our focus on premium also applies to lending. We attract a far more premium and higher credit quality customer that enables us to maintain and even widen our lend margins. The second point is on the right side of the page.
This strategy has not only maintained our best-in-class credit performance, but the leadership gap between American Express and the top five issuers in the U.S. has widened since 2019. Finally, and what I find most encouraging, are the metrics behind the fourth advantage of the membership model: superior loyalty and engagement with our global brand. As you can see from the left side of this slide, we have a 98% build-business retention rate, and this number has improved since 2019. But what I find most compelling is the graph on the right, which shows how loyal our customers are to American Express even when times are tough. The top line represents the industry delinquency rate average excluding American Express customers, and you can see that it is higher than 2019. The very bottom blue line represents American Express customers on American Express products.
You can see the delinquency rate is still below 2019, and we've widened our industry-leading credit performance. But what is most interesting is the line in the middle, which represents the delinquency rate of Amex customers on competitor cards that are also in their wallet. This line shows that even when our customers are faced with limited funds and difficult credit choices, they prioritize paying Amex above paying competitors. And this advantage has also widened since 2019. So with that in mind, I'd now like to talk about how we execute, innovate, and bring this unique model to life. Execution starts with a disciplined innovation and a strategic focus on premium across the three core components of the membership model that I talked about earlier. So let's start with innovation.
We generate innovation from multiple sources and activities across the company, and two things are unique relative to our industry. The sources of innovation are global, and they are sharpened by a focus on premium. Part of it, as you can see on the left, comes from our strength in partnerships and the way we work with great brands to embed benefits in our products and services. Part of it, as you can see in the middle, is the way we invest in new ventures that give us a front-row seat to learn, or the way we test a new feature inside Amex Labs with a small group of card members to determine if we should build it or buy it based on how they respond.
Plus, Amex Offers is a great way for us to test a new benefit like streaming services on Platinum by first introducing it as a limited-time Amex Offer to see if Card Members like it. And unlike our competitors, we can also test new features or different services in multiple countries simultaneously to learn even more and more quickly. So let's take a closer look at the first core component of the membership model and how we leverage our product design strategy to deliver best-in-class premium payment products. As I briefly mentioned earlier, this playbook is applied across products and around the world and has an impressive track record of driving strong results. There are five key components, and the Platinum refresh is a great way to explain how it all works.
We start by developing innovative ideas to strengthen the value proposition, like adding digital streaming credits and exclusive dining access while doubling down on Platinum's strong travel benefits. At the same time, we work closely with great brands to co-create, co-fund, and deliver superior benefits and services. It is the combination of these first two steps that puts us in a position, as you can see in step three, to deliver more than $1,500 in value and the confidence to raise the annual fee from $550-$695. While these three steps alone deliver strong differentiation, we invest in two more essential steps. We add an emotional layer, where things like member's name embossed on the card, access to hundreds of incredible experiences around the world, or cards designed by world-famous artists give membership meaning by making it personal.
As you can see along the bottom, we constantly look for ways to deliver a consistent beat, drumbeat, of new news that keeps the product fresh, relevant, and lays the groundwork for the next product refresh cycle. What is so encouraging about the success of this strategy is how our premium products have resonated with a younger segment of customers. As you can see from the graph on the left, the Millennial and Gen Z share of new accounts across our Platinum and Gold products has increased to over 75%. We're not just attracting any younger customer. As you can see in the middle of the page, their quality is as strong as our older customers. They have the same willingness and ability to pay a fee, similar lending profiles, slightly lower spend that should naturally grow over time as they age and increase their income.
They also have strong super-prime FICOs and credit quality. When you compare our younger customers to their industry peers on the far right, you see the subset we target and attract are far more premium across a number of dimensions. They have higher average incomes, higher average spend, and higher credit quality. Our success with this subset of premium younger customers also delivers a steeper initial growth curve and is expected to provide greater lifetime value. We see this within our portfolio today. As you can see from the graph on the left, when we compare the cumulative growth of new millennial and Gen Z customers with older age cohorts who joined American Express in the same year, we see significantly steeper growth in spend over the same period, in this case, around two times for the younger segment.
When you combine this steeper growth curve with the fact that we attract these premium customers much earlier in their careers and on average benefit from 20+ more relationship years, it translates into about two times greater expected lifetime value than older age customers we acquire later in life. As you can see on the right side of the page, their credit quality outperforms their industry peers, similar to our older customers. Another important point about our best-in-class premium products is how they also power our premium lending strategy and growth. As you can see from the graph on the left, which shows U.S. consumer AR growth since 2019, our lending growth is coming from our premium fee-based cards that have higher credit quality and, as you can see, lower write-offs. Lending on our no-fee cards is actually shrinking.
As you can see on the right, innovative lending features introduced just a few years ago, like Pay Over Time and Plan It, are driving strong lending growth on our charge products while maintaining exceptional credit performance. Core to our premium lending strategy is a focus on lower-risk segments and existing customers, where we believe there is still a big opportunity for growth. As you can see on the far left, when we look at Revolve AR growth by FICO, our strategy to target lower-risk segments has translated into significantly higher growth versus the industry in the highest credit quality segments. A big part of this ability to target lower-risk segments comes from the fact that more than 70% of our revolving loan growth comes from existing customers we know well, as you can see on the middle of this slide.
If you shift your eyes to the box on the far right, we believe our premium-focused lending strategy still has substantial runway for growth. We only have 24% share of our existing customers' lend wallet. With this in mind, let's shift to the second core component of the membership model: our powerful set of differentiated membership services. As we discussed earlier, these membership services play a critical role in delivering superior and highly differentiated premium benefits and services, many of which are highlighted across this page. Whether it is a hotel upgrade or access to that hard-to-get table, our Premier Airport lounges, or Centurion New York, each of these benefits delivers great value to our customers unlocked by membership and their subscription-like membership fee. These membership services also play an important role in strengthening our two-sided, integrated network business model.
Each of these services delivers value to our card members and Amex merchants in a way that requires the card to be used to unlock benefits. In turn, it pulls more of that category spend onto our network and our membership ecosystem. As you can see from the column on the right, travel and dining card member spend is growing significantly faster on our network than spending overall in these categories. Amex offers, which are statement credits funded by retailers and merchants, can only be triggered by spending on an Amex card. As you can see, the pace of growth and use by our card members is very strong. As you can see, our deep experience and the investments we're making in travel are paying off. On important key dimensions, we're outperforming the industry in premium travel.
For example, about 50% of all Amex Travel air sales are premium front-of-the-plane bookings versus an industry average of about 25%. The same can be said about lodging, where luxury hotel makes up about 30% of our sales versus an industry average of about 15%. Our card members clearly value proprietary Fine Hotels & Resorts and the Hotel Collection benefits. Sales volume for those properties has more than doubled since 2019. Dining is another great example of a service that is unmatched in our industry. Since we acquired Resy, we've increased the number of engaged diners on the platform by 3x, increased the number of restaurants by more than 5x, and driven strong growth in diners seated.
We spent the last several years creating a set of core proprietary dining benefits and experiences similar to Fine Hotels and Resorts that can only be unlocked by membership and are now deeply integrated across our core card business. So shifting to our third and final core component of our membership model, partnerships and partner-funded value, our position starts with one of the most comprehensive sets of strategic partnerships in the world. The way we integrate them across almost every aspect of our business differentiates us from our competitors.
From the significant portfolio of co-brand product partners around the globe that you see at the top of the page, to the 30-plus great brands embedded in our card products, to the over 2,000 brands co-funding value for customers through Amex Offers, and the way we work with 80-plus partners around the world to give members special access to incredible experiences, these partnerships deliver benefits in a way that is difficult for our competitors to replicate. For example, a U.S. card member can enjoy airline lounges in Europe leveraging co-brand relationships in that region. Or we can leverage our global presence and partner with F1, Wimbledon, or stadiums around the world to give Amex card members in multiple countries special access to great events and differentiated benefits.
We build on this strong foundation of partnerships by combining it with that unmatched and highly attractive global customer base that I talked about earlier in the presentation. This combination is powerful. It creates a partner-funded flywheel, where access to our higher-margin premium customer base enables us to attract great brands willing to fund and market superior benefits at better margins that, in turn, attract more premium customers and more great brands. I want to make one additional point that is unique to our model and our company. Our products are backed by a global servicing footprint that delivers exceptional service at a local level in 26 countries and 17 languages around the world. As you'll hear from Anré Williams later today, we set the standard for service excellence. It matters in premium, where the bar and customer expectations are very, very high.
When you look at our performance over the last several years, as we've shared in earnings calls, it's very clear that our membership model is working. What is even more compelling is when you look at the underlying metrics that distinguish our premium model. Our premium metrics have only become even stronger over time. In the upper left, you'll see that there is no question that we are attracting a more premium and younger customer. Fee-based accounts now make up 77% of all new cards, up a full 17 points from 2019. And 75% of all Platinum and Gold, our Millennial and Gen Z customers, also up significantly from 2019. The same progress can be seen in engagement on the right side of the page. We're doing a much better job at driving deeper engagement with our products and services.
This is translated into significantly higher average revenue, spend, revolve, and net card fees. When you're attracting a more premium new customer and driving deeper engagement with existing customers, you deliver industry-leading credit performance that, as I touched on earlier, has only widened the gap versus the top five issuers since 2019. Finally, let's spend a few minutes talking about why we think there is such a long and attractive runway for accelerated growth, which, in turn, allows us to stick to this winning strategy. For starters, we operate in a very attractive industry that is expected to continue to grow in the U.S. by around 8% and reach close to $6 trillion in billings by 2026. If you look at industry data on account growth over the last several years, you see that premium fee-based accounts are growing two times faster than no-fee accounts.
Younger segments are growing even faster. This plays to our strengths as an industry leader deeply focused on the premium segment. As you can see on the far right, we are growing significantly faster than the industry on both dimensions. To summarize why we think the growth opportunity is compelling, our relative share of accounts is low, we operate in an industry that is growing, and the fastest growing segments play to our strengths. Finally, we have strong momentum with premium younger customers who deliver significantly more years of membership and about two times higher estimated lifetime value. So I will end with where I started. I hope you will take away four things from today's presentation. First, our unique membership model and innovation have been the driving force behind our performance and leadership position in this premium segment.
Two, the model delivers four powerful outcomes that are not only differentiated in our industry, they are difficult to replicate. Three, it's a proven strategy that has a track record of delivering strong results and momentum, and it has widened our leadership position. And finally, four, the premium segment remains very attractive, plays to our strengths, and has a long runway for growth. As a result, we remain confident we can deliver accelerated growth and continue to widen our leadership position. Thank you. Now, let me turn it over to my colleague, Anna Marrs.
You can come on down.
All right. Good morning. As I just described our pioneering membership model, I'm going to talk about small business and why we believe SME is a growth opportunity for American Express. Since the launch of our first card for businesses in 1966, we've built on our membership model. Today, we serve nearly four million American small businesses. We serve customers across every corner of the U.S. economy, across industries. We work with startup businesses and with well-established corporations. Since the pandemic, we've seen a boom and a moderation in small business spending. But all along, we've been building. We've been building new channels to acquire more customers. We've been building new products to deepen our relationship with customers. We've been building an ecosystem to make it easier for our customers to grow their businesses with American Express.
Altogether, we've built a more resilient business, a business that creates more opportunity for growth in both the short term and the long term. Today, I'm going to address three topics. First, the proof points and how we've strengthened our leadership position through the volatile post-pandemic period. Next, the advantages that will enable us to defend our leadership position. And finally, how we're driving growth through acquiring and deepening our relationships with our small business customers. But before we look ahead, let's look back. The last four years have been anything but normal. Small businesses have faced a lot of uncertainty. So how have small businesses used their cards in the face of this uncertainty? And what are the proof points that we've strengthened our leadership position? One proof point is in the growth of small business card spending. This is a picture of U.S.
Small business card spending since 2010. You can see that traditionally, it's been a steady momentum business. In 2020, that steady pattern changed. As we moved through the pandemic and then beyond, we saw spend rapidly expand, followed by a spend moderation in 2023. Through this volatile period, we grew our share. American Express had a 45.8% share of all small business card spending in 2019. Today, that share is 47.1%. Another proof point comes when you break down the drivers of spend growth. We look at spend on our cards in three ways: spend we gain from new customers acquired, spend we lose from customer attrition, and spend we grow organically. Organic is spend from customers who've been with us for 13 months. Think same-store sales. As we invested more in marketing, spend from new customer acquisition grew.
Spend lost from attrition remained stable and below 2019 levels. The real action on this page is in that organic spend category. In 2019, organic spend contributed 3 percentage points to our growth. In 2021 and 2022, organic's contribution boomed. Organic spend contributed 19 percentage points to growth in 2021 and 13 percentage points to growth in 2022. Now, we've all read the headlines, and we know the macro drivers: $1 trillion of stimulus injected into the U.S. economy, inventory restocking, supply chain disruption, inflation. In 2023, organic spend's contribution to growth moderated. We believe the current organic spend moderation is largely macro-driven as we grow over the boom and as small businesses tighten their belts to cope with higher costs of borrowing, industry-specific slowdowns, and a more uncertain business environment. Through this period, organic spend has been very difficult to forecast. It will likely remain difficult to forecast.
The exact pace of recovery or the ultimate level of organic spend in the near term. But through this organic spend boom and moderation, we've stayed focused on growing and retaining our customers. We've been securing our leadership position to drive future growth. Another proof point in the power of our leadership position comes with the attractiveness of the small business card opportunity. There are multiple reasons why we believe in this opportunity over the long term. First, there are more small businesses. Small business formation increased 56% after the pandemic, and it stayed there. Second, payments continue to digitize. Isn't it remarkable that 33% of all small business payments in the U.S. are still made via paper check? But we're seeing those payments digitize rapidly. They've gone from 67% of small business payments with checks in 2010 to 33% in 2022.
Finally, the card remains a really useful way for small businesses to pay. Businesses value the cash flow flexibility that comes with the card. They value being rewarded for their spending, and they value the elevated level of purchase protection. This page reminds us of all the opportunity in small business cards. Small business is a great place to have a leadership position. Another proof point in the strength of our leadership position can be found in the health of our customer base. There are multiple trends that we see that point to continue the strong demand for and utility of small business card products. Our customer base is growing. We drove a 20% CAGR in new account acquisition from 2019 right through that spend boom and moderation. Our customer base is sticking with us. We retain 98% of the spend put on our cards year over year.
Our customers are using their products. Although organic spend, in dollar terms, moderated, when you look at organic spend transaction count or the number of times that existing customers use their card, it grew 9% last year. This is a healthy and growing customer base. Another proof point in the strength of our leadership position can be seen in the impact of our premium product strategy. The health of our customer base and their willingness to do more with Amex has enabled us to drive more revenue per dollar of spend. In 2019, our largest acquisition product, excluding our co-brand cards, was Blue Business Cash, a no-fee credit card. In 2023, our largest acquisition product was our newly refreshed Business Platinum Card. The $695 annual fee card is price to value. Business Platinum delivers over $1,400 in benefits and statement credits.
In addition to the higher fees on these cards, we've also expanded our customers' ability to revolve with features like pay over time. We've grown lending responsibly, with most of that growth coming from existing customers. Taken together, this premium fee growth, combined with responsible lending growth, has led to a 21% increase in revenue for every dollar of billed business spend. The final proof point in the strength of our leadership position is how we've leveraged it to drive a larger multiplier between spend growth and revenue growth. We've diversified our revenue model to ensure that fees and lend also work hard to drive growth. In 2019, revenue grew 7% on 6% billed business growth. In 2023, spend only grew 3%, but commercial services delivered 9% revenue growth. This higher revenue per dollar of billed business dynamic is sustained through the first quarter of this year.
Commercial Services grew billings 2% in the first quarter of 2024, slightly above the 1% in the last quarter of last year. But in the back of that 2% billings growth, we delivered 8% revenue growth. Now, I'm not saying that spend doesn't matter. It does. But it's not all that matters. And what's really exciting about this chart really makes us excited about what's possible as the small business economy recovers. So far, I've spoken about how we've strengthened our leadership position through a volatile spend period. And it's great to be a leader in any business. But what I want to talk about now is why we believe in our ability to defend our leadership position going forward. This slide reminds us of the strength of our leadership position. We're the undisputed leader in small business cards. We have over $400 billion in annual SME billings.
We have 3.9 million small business card members. We have a leadership position in small business that's 3 times larger than the next competitor. But what advantages will enable us to defend our leadership position as we look ahead? American Express's leadership position is built on a series of competitive advantages, from our suite of small business-focused products to our ability to surround our customers with a superior service experience. Taken together, these advantages provide American Express with a clear edge in small business cards. One advantage is the suite of small business products we offer and refresh regularly. Over the last 3 years, we refreshed 2 of our largest portfolios: the Business Platinum card in 2021 and the Business Gold card in 2023. These cards are built for what small businesses value, and we see that in our Net Promoter Scores.
Our customers give our cards a net promoter score that's 18 percentage points higher than the competition. The value of these products is recognized by our customers' willingness to pay a fee that is the highest in these cards' categories. We've driven a 16% CAGR in fee income from our small business cards since 2019. Another advantage is in our scaled sales and marketing engine. At the core of this engine is a set of business-focused, AI-driven models and analytics talent. These models ingest data from over 30 sources and create a 360-degree view of the prospect and customer opportunity. We precisely and efficiently target how we reach our customers. We target the channel, whether through digital marketing or an American Express colleague. We target the right product, and we target the right offer level to drive efficient conversion. This engine has doubled our U.S.
Small business card Billed Business acquired versus 2019. And that scale, driven by personalized digital capabilities and nearly 1,000 sales and account development colleagues across the U.S., is very difficult to replicate. Another advantage is that we give our small business customers what they need while managing the company's credit risk. And what businesses want is to use their card at scale. The innovation we've driven through no preset spending limit capabilities enables us to meet that need and to provide more than three times the spending power of the competition for our highest spending small business card members. And these same models and capabilities also enable us to prudently manage credit outcomes. Before the pandemic, our competitors' small business delinquency rates were 1.5 times higher than ours. You can see that last year that advantage grew, with competitors now experiencing 1.8x higher delinquency rates.
You can also see that our small business delinquency rates remain below what they were before the pandemic. The final advantage I want to cover is service. We have a brand that's synonymous with service. Our service capabilities structurally surround our small business customers, building satisfaction and loyalty. Through our sophisticated marketing channels and dedicated account development teams, we can offer a range of small business card products, merchant acceptance, lines of credit and checking, efficient marketing channels through our merchant offers capability, and more. Any one of these advantages set us apart from our competitors. Taken together, they enable us to fulfill our brand promise of powerful backing for our small business customers. They create an overall competitive advantage that enables us to defend and even grow from our leadership position. I started this presentation talking about how we have strengthened our leadership position.
I then covered why we believe in our ability to defend our leadership position. But we're not just plain defense. I'll close by talking about how we're playing offense and taking action to drive small business growth. We're taking action in two major areas: actions that continue to drive strong acquisition momentum and actions that drive engagement and revenue growth from existing customers. Let's first dig into how we're driving strong customer acquisition momentum to fuel our growth. One action we're taking to drive acquisition momentum is through sustained levels of investment. Coming out of the pandemic, we saw the opportunity to increase marketing investment and accelerate growth. We more than doubled our marketing investment in 2023 versus before the pandemic. This investment, deployed through those analytics-led sales and marketing engines I described earlier, has more than doubled the number of new accounts we acquire every year.
Another action we're taking to drive acquisition momentum is through personalized offers. Our AI models enable us to target larger businesses with richer offers, both ensuring we deploy our investments efficiently and to increase response rates. Targeted offers achieve, on average, 30% higher response rates. We've nearly quadrupled the amount of offers that are personalized since 2019. We've invested in data and targeting capabilities, making personalization a continued driver both of new customer acquisition and marketing investment efficiency. Another action we're taking to drive acquisition momentum comes from the crossover we see between consumer card members who are also small business customers. We can target prospective small business customers who are already Amex customers today through their buying behaviors and presence on commercial bureaus. When we capitalize on that crossover, we don't see a substitution between personal and small business product. We see an overall spend lift.
That's because when our Card Member has a small business product with a limit underwritten by our commercial models, we can provide appropriate business-level spend. This very high-quality and already Amex loyal base of Card Members is a highly attractive prospect pool with an average FICO of 765. The final action we're taking to drive acquisition momentum is through our strong network of partners. We leverage these partnerships in multiple ways. We have fantastic co-brand partners that enable us to offer relevant reward currencies and reach into partner channels for customer acquisition. In addition, our partner network provides rational value for our fee-based products. But we're also building out new ways to partner, including the launch of our Amex Sync program last year.
Sync provides standardized APIs enabling early-stage companies to utilize Amex capabilities as they expand their product offerings, ensuring that our card customers will not need to choose between fintechs in their Amex card program. They can have both. Let's turn now to the actions we're taking to drive revenue growth through customer engagement. At the start of the presentation, I talked about organic spend. At our recent earnings, Christoph and Steve talked about all the analysis we've done to understand organic trends and drivers. But we haven't just analyzed. We're taking action. The actions we've taken have already changed the multiplier between spend and revenue. And we're taking more actions to drive both spend and revenue growth into the future. One action we're taking to drive revenue growth through customer engagement is through spend treatments that grow customer spend over time.
We maximize card spend through getting new cards rapidly active to drive first dollar spend. We maximize card spend through adding employee cards as businesses grow. We maximize card spend through introducing more premium offerings when customers enter a new stage of development. These spend treatments drive ongoing customer engagement and spend growth. These customer treatments helped drive that strong 9% organic transaction count growth we saw in our customer base last year. Another action we're taking to drive revenue growth through customer engagement is through leveraging the integrated model, or what we sometimes call the closed loop, to drive small business spending. Whether through implementing an AP automation software solution like our proprietary One AP solution or by simply sharing their AP file with their account development rep, an Amex small business customer can maximize the spend they put on their card program.
This full-file approach enables us to grow card spend for customers who share their AP file by 20% on average. Another action we're taking to drive revenue growth through customer engagement is by providing our customers the digital ecosystem that makes it easier to do more with American Express. Business Blueprint, the digital home for our small business products, drives this better-together connectivity. Blueprint is great for our small business customers. And for many, it's becoming the first touchpoint they have with American Express business membership. When customers access Blueprint, 18% take a second product within three months. We now meet three-plus business needs for more than 50% of our small business customers, with a lot of runway for growth. Another action we're taking to drive revenue growth through customer engagement is through enabling our customers to revolve, not just on credit cards but also on our charge card portfolio.
Coming out of the pandemic, we embedded a capability we call Pay Over Time on 92% of our charge portfolio. While in the past, our charge products required customers to pay their balance in full every month, Pay Over Time enables customers to revolve a portion of their balance when they need more payment and cash flow flexibility. Pay Over Time is one innovation that helped drive strong lend AR growth in our small business card portfolios since 2019. At the end of 2023, we had a 31% share of all small business card borrowing, up from 24% in 2021. But despite these recent growth levels, we still punch beneath our weight in card revolve. Compare that 31% share of small business card borrowing on our products to the 47% share we hold of overall small business spend.
On the right of this page, I highlight some statistics about the quality of recent growth, double-clicking on growth in 2023. In 2023, around 70% of the average revolving loan growth came from existing small business customers. The average FICO of this growth is 747. This growth comes from more mature small businesses. 2/3 of the growth is coming from businesses who've been in operations for more than 5 years. Since embedding pay-over-time, we've innovated to drive high-quality lending growth in our customer base. We plan to continue to leverage these strategies to drive high-quality lending growth going forward. The final action we're taking to drive revenue growth through customer engagement is through the introduction of entirely new product categories. First, the digitally native business line of credit.
Customers that utilize our line of credit average around 3 loans per year, helping them manage major purchases and cash flow cycle. Second, business checking. Today, we see increased engagement from active checking account customers. These customers access their account 8 times a month. Our customers have a clear need for these products, and they also drive inherently more engagement with American Express. You can see, we're not just on the sidelines waiting for organic spend to come back. We're taking action to ensure that SME is a growth engine for the future. The last few years have been a volatile time for small businesses. Through that volatility, we've built a stronger and a more diversified business. We've built on our leadership position in cards. We've invested in and optimized our powerful marketing engine.
We innovated new products and capabilities that drive customer engagement and customer growth. Small businesses have always relied on the support, service, and strength of American Express. We've built a more resilient business because that's what our customers expect of us: a business that's generating more opportunity for growth now and in the future. I'll now hand over to Rafael Marquez, President, International Card Services.
Hello, everyone. I'm excited to be here today to talk to you about the international business, where we have a strong track record of growth and confidence that we can continue to deliver momentum for American Express. The key takeaways I will share with you are: first, the international business has been a growth driver for American Express. Emerging from the pandemic, our investment in our products and membership model reestablished and strengthened our momentum. Third, we have a significant runway for growth, and we are set up to be accretive to the enterprise aspiration of 10%+ revenue growth. Our focus today is to explain the three key reasons for this momentum and why I believe we can continue to grow significantly by focusing on the right countries, the right customer segments, and utilizing our unique membership model for growth.
To start, I want to provide an overview of how the international proprietary business has been performing for the enterprise. Prior to the pandemic, international was delivering strong billings growth, which translated into annual FX-adjusted revenue growth of 10%. In the midst of the pandemic, we invested heavily in our customers and refined our strategy to double down on product refreshes, lean into partnerships, and strengthen our value propositions. This enabled us to emerge in an even stronger position with great momentum in our 2022 and 2023 results, producing growth rates higher than the enterprise. Now, I will go deeper into why we've been able to achieve these growth rates, starting by the fact that we operate in the right countries. American Express operates globally with multiple models.
Today, I'm going to focus on the countries where we are a proprietary issuer and generate the lion's share of our international revenue. Our largest 15 countries comprise 57% of the estimated total international card payments revenue pool across the industry. Our top five countries, Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, and the U.K. , which you can see highlighted, represent one-third of that same pool. For the remaining opportunities outside of the geographies where we operate as proprietary, we operate through a network partnership model, working closely with other institutions to serve customers. Our membership model and focus on premium consumer and small business in these five countries have enabled us to outgrow the industry. Our revenue is growing faster than the industry in both pre- and post-pandemic periods. That revenue momentum has been driven by successfully growing billings faster than the industry over the same time horizon.
This is a direct outcome of the strength of our value propositions and the investments that have generated product demand and engagement within our target segments. We see significant runway to sustain this growth in the future. Our share of the combined credit and debit spend in each of these countries ranges from 11% in Mexico to 4% in Canada. And while we have been able to outpace the growth of the industry in our largest five countries, we're very excited about the growth opportunities and confident in our ability to continue delivering significant value for our customer base. We're also focused on the right segments, in particular premium consumers and small businesses. We have a long history of providing strong value propositions and fantastic service to our customers.
Over time, we have sharpened our focus on the premium consumer and small business segments, where we have the best growth opportunities. I will start with our premium consumer base. Our customers spend, on average, 4x more on their American Express card than the average spend across all credit cards. In some countries, like Japan, this number is even higher, reaching close to 8x that same average. Additionally, our premium consumer customers have better credit performance with lower delinquency rates than the industry, as exemplified by Australia and the UK. Our product value propositions attract higher-spending customers that are willing to pay a fee for the products and services that they enjoy. Our small business segment also offers a great growth opportunity. They spend, on average, 4.7x more than our already high-spending consumer base.
While small business volumes are a smaller contribution to our international business today, it is the fastest-growing segment in international and has significant runway for growth, as evidenced by our penetration on the total population of small and medium-sized enterprises within our top countries. For example, in Japan, which is one of our largest countries for small businesses, we estimate that 9% of small businesses have an American Express small business card. Additionally, we are one of only a few players in international providing credit and charge products tailored to these customer segments. And in some cases, we are creating the category of small business products. The premium nature of our international business is further illustrated by our spend mix. When compared with our U.S. business that itself is premium, we have a larger share of travel and entertainment and cross-border spend.
This reinforces how the membership model, as explained by Howard earlier, attracts a more premium set of customers and businesses. Our revenue mix also demonstrates the premium nature of our international business. As you can see on the slide, international generates the largest share of its revenue from spend and fees, reflecting our ability to price for the significant value of our products, which I will expand on in a moment. When looking at net interest income, we see an opportunity to enhance our membership model and meet the borrowing needs of our premium consumer and small business customers. Now that I've explained why we believe we operate in the right countries and our focus in the right segments, I want to go deeper on the membership model.
In particular, I will unpack how our product suite across both consumer and small businesses is continuously evolving through partnerships and innovation, and how we are able to attract, engage, and retain a younger customer base. As Howard mentioned earlier, our membership model is global and is built on three core components: first, premium payment products; second, differentiated membership services; and third, partnerships and partner-funded value. We operate internationally similar to the U.S., with a strong set of proprietary products across both Centurion Line and Co-Brand. Through these products, we're able to serve both our premium consumer and small business segments. We have an enviable set of Co-Brand partners with whom we develop synergistic products that have enabled us and the partner to grow together, serving our mutual customers in several cases across both consumer and small business segments.
We continuously evolve our value propositions to ensure that our products remain attractive, competitive, and contemporary, identifying opportunities to provide additional value across key customer passion points. For example, in 2023, we executed on more than 30 product refreshes to enhance our value propositions and price for value. This year, we have around 40 planned refreshes globally. Our Platinum portfolio illustrates this strategy, where we've created strong value propositions and are able to price accordingly. For example, in Japan and Australia, we enhanced the value proposition of our Platinum card, which enabled us to price for value and increase the annual fee while expanding the size of the portfolio. We have been on this journey for several years, and we're confident that our membership model will continue to evolve and grow. Underpinning the success of our premium product suite is a broad set of partnerships.
This includes some of our key U.S. partnerships that we have been able to successfully expand to international, such as our Hilton, Delta, and Marriott Co-Brand products. Partners also support our ability to drive premium value. For example, we're able to provide access to more than 1,400 lounges globally through our proprietary network and our partners. Also, our Membership Rewards program enables our customers to redeem their rewards points at a wide selection of partners, from global traditional airlines and hotels to highly relevant local retailers. As a result of all this, our premium offering is highly attractive, and we are always developing improvements to our products with partners that are interested in growing with us. Product evolution across the U.S. and international has only been possible as a result of the innovation exchange that we have across both geographies.
As an example, our customer referral program, Member Get Member, which is highly valued by consumer and small business globally and is a key acquisition channel, was firstly built and tested in International before it expanded to the U.S. On the flip side, we take significant learnings from the U.S., for example, unlocking opportunities to scale partner-funded value. This innovation value exchange further strengthens our products and services globally. In addition to the product evolution, we're also focused on evolving the way we interact with our customers. We are digitizing the way we acquire new customers through a broad range of new channels. The way that we interact with customers is also becoming more digital. We are also evolving our capabilities to serve more borrowing needs of our customers. We're making progress in all these areas, and we still have a lot of room to grow.
Our membership model has proven successful through our ability to attract new generations of our customer base. In 2023, 68% of all consumer cards acquired in international were from millennials and Gen Z, which is a 17 percentage point increase versus 2019. These customers are increasingly choosing to begin their American Express relationship on fee-based products. In addition, they also present an opportunity for us to grow with them through their customer lifecycle. The strength of our model is not only evidenced by our ability to attract new customers but also to retain and increase billings. Average customer spending has grown 42% since 2019, and we've been able to do all this while retaining, on average, 96% of billings each year.
Finally, and as an introduction to the topic Raymond will talk about next, we have been making significant progress on expanding coverage, which will serve as an additional growth lever, enabling existing and new card members to benefit from more places to spend. So to summarize, our international proprietary business has been a source of growth for American Express, and we are confident that it will continue to be a fast-growing segment for the company. This is because we operate in a growing industry within the right countries, we're focused on the right segments with premium consumer and small businesses, and have proven ability to innovate on our membership model. Based on these factors, we expect the international business to be accretive to the enterprise aspiration of delivering sustained 10%-plus revenue growth. And with that, I want to thank you for your time today.
We're going to take a 20-minute break, and when we return, you will hear from my colleague, Raymond Joabar.
Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to speak with you today.
Good morning. When you think about American Express's core customer base, we have the card members who use our cards and the global network of merchants that accept them. So far today, you've heard from my colleagues who manage the consumer, commercial, and the international card issuing side of American Express. In the next 20 minutes, I'm going to shed light on the arm of our business dedicated to expanding our network of accepting merchants and the role it plays in the company's growth plan. By increasing the number of locations that accept American Express, we give our card members far more places to spend, which in turn drives revenue and continues to offer significant growth opportunities for the company. As I go through this presentation, there are three key messages to keep in mind.
First, we've more than tripled the number of locations globally that accept American Express since 2017 where our card members live, work, and travel most. Second, these coverage gains are driving scale and relevance and have been a significant contributor to American Express's revenue growth. And lastly, tremendous growth opportunities remain across the globe to sustain this growth. That's because the universe of accepting merchants keeps expanding as new businesses are created every day and existing businesses begin accepting credit cards. We're capturing this volume from day one. And our card members are having a significantly better experience because Amex acceptance is growing at a rapid pace. And finally, over the last few years, we've enhanced our network capabilities to deliver more value to merchants, card members, and partners both today and as the payment ecosystem continues to evolve. Today, I'm going to cover our coverage journey.
First, I'll share the global progress, then provide more detail on both our U.S. and international acceptance strategies. Lastly, I'll highlight how we're driving network volumes by enhancing our capabilities and capitalizing on new opportunities and innovations. Since 2017, we've more than tripled the number of locations worldwide that accept Amex to more than 89 million. That's up from the 66 million we reported at our last Investor Day in 2022. In the U.S., we've maintained virtual parity, meaning American Express card members can use their cards at 99% of the places that accept credit cards. Outside of the U.S., the number of new places accepting Amex has increased fourfold. The result, card members are finding and spending at these new accepting locations driving significant volume growth for the company. With more places to spend, card members are more satisfied with their Amex membership.
A key driver of our success has been the deploying of the hybrid acquiring model where every stakeholder has a role to play. Our teams sign and manage our largest, most strategic merchants who generate the majority of our discount revenue. Our partners efficiently sign and manage this longer tail of smaller merchants, which is critical to increasing card member confidence to use their cards and is transforming the experience for new and existing card members. This page shows the satisfaction and coverage improvement across key countries since 2019. To summarize, we've made tremendous gains in global coverage. Card members are noticing all the new places they can spend, which is translating into incremental volume and revenue growth. In the next two sections, I'll take you through the U.S. and our international coverage progress separately because they're in two different stages of their journey.
Let's start with the U.S. In the U.S., we reached Virtual Parity acceptance in 2019 with 99% of credit card accepting merchants able to accept American Express. We maintain that coverage over time even as the universe of merchants continues to expand. In fact, there were 56% more U.S. small businesses created in 2023 compared to 2019, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and Anna highlighted earlier today. We've added 7 million more locations since 2019, the same year we reached Virtual Parity coverage. As new businesses are created every day and existing businesses begin accepting credit cards, our Hybrid Acquiring Model has been an efficient and effective way to sign the influx of new merchants, allowing us to grow with the industry. Card Members are noticing.
As we add new locations, we're giving customers even more places to spend and new card members are using their Amex more frequently. The chart on the left represents the average number of transactions indexed to 2017 that a new card member makes in their first 12 months of membership. As you can see, we saw 75% more transactions from new card members in 2023 compared to those from 2017. A major reason for the increase in transactions is that the younger generations, the Millennial and Gen Z card members Howard highlighted earlier, are entering the franchise only knowing virtual parity coverage in the U.S., which gives them greater confidence to use their card at the point of sale and enables us to capture a greater share of wallet. As you can see for a couple of our products on the right-hand side.
Beyond new businesses being created every day, there are growth opportunities in some industries as some industries shift towards greater card adoption. An important part of our U.S. strategy lies in signing merchants from industries where credit card acceptance is either new or with lower card penetration versus debit, check, or cash. We've highlighted some of these on the left. Card members want to pay for tuition, rent, charitable donations, subway rides, even charge their electric vehicles with their cards. As you can see on the right, the spending in these new industries is growing every year and we expect these trends to continue for the next several. To summarize our U.S. acceptance journey, reaching virtual parity was only the beginning. Since 2019, we've been moving with the industry as it expands. More small businesses are being created and more industries now accept credit cards.
We're excited about the continued growth opportunities. We've entered 2024 with great momentum, a strategy focused on signing more merchants and ensuring card members know about those coverage gains. These efforts will result in expanded merchant acceptance and greater spend flowing through our network. Now let's look a little closer across international, where at a different stage of our journey. Here we're focused on driving acceptance where it matters most to our card members with three strategic imperatives. First, accelerate international acceptance in key verticals like e-commerce, restaurant, transportation, and lodging. Second, make progress on our priority international cities and tourist destinations where we have a high concentration of card members. And third, deepen coverage across top strategic countries and expand into new countries and territories. Outlined on the right are three main growth levers to help us achieve these imperatives.
First, we're deepening the use of partnerships with third-party processors and payment facilitators. This model helped us reach virtual parity in the U.S. and is increasingly effective across international. Second is expand the use of local bank partnerships to sign and manage merchant acceptance in countries where we don't have a proprietary acquiring business. And third, we're focused on signing key merchant holdouts. Since launching our international coverage strategy in 2017, we've increased acceptance fourfold, reaching 72 million locations at the end of 2023. This progress has significantly contributed to international network spend and has also changed the card member experience from what it was a decade ago. And we're rapidly adding millions of new places for our card members to spend around the world. So where are we adding coverage?
As Rafa highlighted earlier, this graph shows our progress in some of the key industry verticals, our first strategic imperative. We've reached 96% and 90% acceptance with top e-commerce websites and tourist attractions, respectively. We're making good progress in transport and lodging. Our second imperative is focused on accelerating coverage in 48 important international cities and tourist destinations where we have a high concentration of card members. As we began this journey, our initial target was to achieve more than 75% coverage in these locations, ensuring card members could use their cards in at least three out of four accepting merchants. The bars on this chart represent the level of coverage in each of the 48 cities. The dark blue portion indicates our point of departure, while the lighter blue portion is the progress made since launching our strategy.
At the end of 2023, 26 cities were already at or above our initial 75% coverage target. That was just the beginning. Now, with the progress made in these cities and many of their respective countries, we're designing strategies to reach virtual parity coverage over the next several years. In the remaining 22 cities, we're making good progress and still have more work to do to bring them above the initial 75% threshold. We've made good progress. However, we have a tremendous opportunity to capture more spend, drive more growth, and generate more revenue where acceptance is catching up. Tourist destinations are very important to our premium card members. Our card members told us they want to use their cards beyond the resort to explore local shops, markets, restaurants, and attractions. The Caribbean is one example.
Here, we expanded the number of local acquiring banks to sign and manage acceptance on our behalf and the results have been impressive. A little over a year ago, you could use your card at less than 30% of the accepting businesses across these 13 islands. Since then, we've rolled out 23 new bank partnerships on these islands to help drive merchant acceptance. A few of these islands are already at 90% coverage and for the others, we're on track to achieve 90% acceptance once we reach the one-year mark in each of these partnerships. That's a significant increase in the number of places saying yes to American Express. And we expect to duplicate this success across the remaining Caribbean islands in the coming months. Our third imperative further broadens our coverage efforts beyond verticals and priority cities to entire countries.
We're expanding the use of partners like Stripe, Adyen, SumUp to accelerate coverage and card acceptance, ensuring we can capture the long tail of smaller merchants. This approach helped us reach virtual parity in the U.S. and in international, Canada, Australia, and Mexico were early adopters. The graph on the left highlights the progress in Mexico as an example where we've accelerated our coverage gains and now aspire to reach 95% coverage by 2026. Based on this success, we're executing this strategy in the U.K. and in certain countries across continental Europe where we aspire to reach 90% and 80% coverage, respectively, by 2026. To close out this section, we'll continue to accelerate coverage where our card members live, work, and travel most.
By 2026, we aspire to reach 90 million total international accepting locations, achieve our initial goal of 75% coverage across all 48 priority cities, and increase the number of countries with more than 75% coverage. We anticipate that achieving these aspirations by 2026 will significantly increase total international spend. The last step in our coverage journey is enhancing our capabilities to enable safer, more secure transactions as technology and the payment landscape continues to evolve. To capitalize on these emerging innovations, we've significantly enhanced our global payments network. Our network now runs on a more flexible, modular architecture built on secure private cloud technology that evolves and expands to meet our customers' and partners' needs. We've enhanced the security and integrity of the network while making it faster, more agile, more flexible, opening up tremendous growth opportunities to innovate and evolve for the future.
For example, our new modern capabilities are enabling us to uplift our popular Amex Offers program, providing greater value to both merchants and card members. Expand our Agile Partner Platform, allowing fintechs and other partners to launch payment innovations on our network more rapidly. Capture more spend by accelerating tap-to-pay payments for transit. In the next few slides, I'll dive deeper into each of these value propositions. As mentioned earlier today, Amex Offers epitomizes our integrated business model, harnessing direct relationships with card members and merchants, driving value to both. It's a powerful program that taps into the fact that all businesses want to grow revenue by finding new customers and drive more loyalty with existing ones. To do this, businesses advertise. They face a myriad of options for their advertising spend and this is where Amex Offers comes in.
It's a digital advertising platform that provides an extremely efficient and effective way to deliver personalized offers to our premium, high-spending Card Members through our mobile app and online. You can see a few examples of participating merchants on the left. They span retail, travel, dining, and everyday spend categories. The enrollment and redemption process is simple. Just click to add the offer to your card, make a purchase, and we'll handle the rest. What differentiates us from other advertising engines: merchants can market to our high-spending Card Members and only pay when an offer is redeemed. We pass the value to Card Members in the form of savings, cashback, or rewards. This model provides a terrific return on their advertising spend. Since 2017, we've more than tripled the amount of Card Member savings and value generated through Amex Offers. That's value measured in $ hundreds of millions.
We're investing to make the platform even better. By leveraging American Express's differentiated assets, you can see a number of them on the left side of the slide, we're transforming our platform to increase the speed to market, enhance personalization, and scale offer content globally. Our ambition is to unlock a five-fold increase in global partner-funded value for our card members and a three-fold increase in the number of card members redeeming over the next three years. Driving loyalty and reinforcing value of membership to both merchants and card members. Our next value proposition is the Agile Partner Platform, or APP as we call it, which gives FinTechs and other partners a more seamless way to launch cards on our network. We built a bench of sponsor banks, issuer processors, program managers who quickly get our partners' innovative payment products to market.
One of the benefits of APP is that we offer access to Amex branded assets and capabilities like Amex Offers, presale ticketing, and dining benefits. Square was one of the first cards launched with APP. Their credit card seamlessly integrates with existing Square seller accounts and provides discounts on processing fees. Every new card riding on our network only expands the number of Amex cards seen by merchants at the point of sale. This makes our brand more relevant and, above all, increases the vibrancy of our network. Finally, let's dive into transit. Transit is an important everyday spend category that can help our cards achieve top-of-wallet status. For many of our Card Members, transit purchases are a daily occurrence where the average transaction is about $2-$3 depending upon where you live.
Over the last several years, we've seen more and more transit authorities moving to open-loop payment systems. That's where card members can tap to pay with their card or digital wallet directly at the fare gate instead of purchasing a ticket ahead of time. New York City subway and trains in Osaka are two great examples. Amex has accepted at almost 600 transit authorities around the globe and 81 of those are live with tap-to-pay. As more transit authorities convert to the open-loop technology, our cards will be accepted. And the story doesn't stop when a rider leaves the station. We've seen a halo effect driving incremental spend from these transit users as they continue to tap and pay for coffee, for lunch, for essential everyday spend purchases. So we've covered a lot of ground today. Let me recap some of the key messages.
We've more than tripled the number of locations that accept Amex since 2017. Where card members live, work, and travel most. And yet, tremendous opportunities remain. Those gains are driving scale and relevance. Giving new and existing card members more places to spend and changing their perceptions. And that's translating into more confidence at the point of sale and higher share of wallet. The coverage gains are a significant contributor to American Express's revenue growth. We have strong momentum, an experienced and energized team, and believe that successful execution of our strategy will continue to sustainably drive stronger revenue growth. I'd like now to introduce my colleague, Anré Williams, who will discuss how the enterprise is driving efficiency, growth, and service through technology. Thank you.
Good afternoon. Today, I'm going to discuss how we're enabling efficiency, growth, and service excellence through technology for the company.
In our time today, I'll outline our approach in three key areas. How we're creating operating leverage, how technology powers our business model enables growth for the company, and how technology continues to enable service excellence, which is a core part of our company's business model. My aim is by the end of this presentation, you'll understand how technology, digital, and servicing capabilities come together and how they support the company's long-term growth aspirations. First, we'll begin with operating leverage. This slide shows how we've created and maintained operating expense leverage for the company, which in turn enables growth. Here, we look at expenses in three broad categories that are a large portion of our total operating expenses. First, servicing expenses include the cost of customer care professionals, travel counselors, and our global service centers, as well as our credit servicing cost and global real estate.
Technology operations expenses include the cost of processing transactions, upgrading and maintaining our tech infrastructure, and cybersecurity. Tech investment expenses encompass our development spending for new products, new services, and new capabilities. As you can see, these expenses have increased each year. However, they've grown slower than our company's revenues. As a result, these expenses, as a percentage of revenues, have declined from 13.4% in 2019 to 11.9% in 2023. As a result, this shows we've built sustainable momentum in creating operating expense leverage for the company and we're confident that we can continue to deliver this in the future. When you look at this slide, you'll see that our annual servicing expenses, as a percentage of revenues, have steadily declined over the past seven years, thus creating operating leverage for the company. Going forward, our aspiration is for servicing expenses to be less than 4.5% of revenues.
We expect to continue our current momentum through the careful and close management of our expense base while continuing to deliver service excellence. Part of the reason we can create sustainable operating leverage is driven by our customers' adoption of digital servicing channels. This slide shows two important themes. First, there's been a consistent yearly increase in the percentage of digitally active card members globally, defined as a card member who's logged onto our website or mobile app at least once in the past month. The second is that our low-tenure card members, defined as those who've been with American Express for less than 12 months, are more digitally active than card members who have been with us longer.
Leveraging the exact same data as the prior slide, here we can see that card members who are 35 years old and younger are more digitally active than those who are over 35. This continues to increase year after year. Also, we are seeing a decline in the number of total phone calls and an increase in customers who choose to leverage our chat channel to complete their servicing request. These bars show the percentage of customer interactions each year since 2019 across chat, phone call service through voice response, and phone call service by one of our customer care professionals. This has all been aided by an increased focus on implementing digital self-service journeys that enable customers in all segments: consumers, small businesses, corporations, and merchants, and in all geographies to complete tasks in their channel of choice.
Given that live phone calls with a customer care professional are our most expensive servicing channel, this has enabled us to continue to provide service excellence in our customer's channel of choice while also containing the growth of our servicing costs. This continued improvement in operating leverage has enabled us to increasingly spend more in technology investment. Over the past three years, we've increased our technology investment spend by approximately $600 million, or a 40% increase from 2021 to the end of this year. This will enable us to invest in our core platforms and in new capabilities that will drive long-term growth. Now, this was a brief run-through how we believe we can continue creating operating leverage for the company through expense management and digitization, while also investing for growth. But now, let me turn to how we can enable growth for the company through technology.
As Steve shared earlier, our company's business models power it through technology. Using technology to enable growth is a core theme of this presentation. I'll start by sharing a snapshot of our technology systems. Our technology systems are an integrated set of platforms that serve our card members on one side and our merchant customers on the other side, with our network in the middle. For example, we support our card members on the issuing side through a simple and easy digital acquisition experience, service them through web and mobile app platforms, and enable the functionality of their products through platforms such as accounts receivable or loyalty and benefits. Within the network, we authorized approximately 11 billion transactions globally in 2023, all while ensuring we protect our customers and company with a network built on secure private cloud technology.
For our merchants, we enable an easy onboarding experience while ensuring we support them with pricing, payments, and settlement capabilities. With our increase in technology investment, we are focused on the continuous development of our core platforms and investment into new capabilities. We've done this through a thoughtful, intentional, multi-year investment strategy, which has enabled us to uplift our technology over time. A few examples include: during the past 5 years, we continuously invested in the development of our network, which enabled us to be the first global network authorized to issue local currency cards in China. We also enabled new functionality for more than 100 banks around the world who issue cards on the network, giving them the ability to process debit, QR codes, and ACH transactions if they desire.
Continuous investment in our servicing capabilities should drive integrated global ecosystems that allow us to provide our customers with even more efficient and personalized interactions and provide our colleagues with the cutting-edge tools they need to deliver service excellence. The enhancement of our next-gen data platform allows us to build more models more quickly, enabling real-time decisioning and insights. It's important to note that we continue to make significant investments in strengthening our risk management, control, and compliance, ensuring we have the appropriate controls in place to maintain the trust and security that is foundational to our brand. Of course, our existing technology capabilities have enabled scale that has driven profitable growth across the company, including many examples you've heard today. This allows us to enhance our value propositions, increase acquisition efficiency, and improve customer satisfaction.
A few examples include: increased global transactions as customers are able to engage with us in more ways. As Raymond said earlier, global transit taps have nearly tripled in the last 5 years. These taps have been enabled by our technology within global transit systems. Member Get Member, which is powered through our website and mobile app, is our number one acquisition channel in 12 countries. Sales from global travel bookings delivered through our online technology platform have more than doubled since 2019. Our consumer high-yield savings accounts are acquired solely through our digital banking platforms. And total product refreshes enhance the card members' experience through compelling rewards and benefits. Hopefully, you can see we're using technology to enable customers to interact with us in many more ways.
Artificial intelligence, or AI, has been a key technology capability for American Express, which we've been using for over a decade to power growth and improve servicing capabilities for our customers. A few notable examples include: since 2010, we first used AI in our fraud teams as a way of detecting and preventing fraudulent payments and accounts. In 2012, we started using AI to power our merchant offers based on relevancy to our card members and to power our credit risk models. Since 2015, 100% of American Express's credit risk models have leveraged machine learning and covered decisions across the entire card member lifecycle. In 2022, we established our newest decision science center of excellence in Singapore to focus on machine learning and AI. Our use of AI over time has laid the foundation for our move into generative artificial intelligence, also known as GenAI.
Over the past year, everyone's been talking about generative AI. At American Express, we believe GenAI has significant potential to help us serve our customers better and help the company grow. Across the company, we've organized our GenAI-focused areas around the themes of protection, productivity, and growth. We currently have several pilots underway, and we expect to stand up more as we continue to learn. Our initial focus has been on use cases that can improve productivity, particularly within servicing and technology. Not every pilot is successful, yet we learn from all of them. Here are examples of three pilots which were successful that we're now scaling because we believe they can be transformational. Each of them builds on our current foundation of leveraging AI models and our data to deliver enhanced experiences for customers.
The first, Travel Counselor Assist, provides travel planning support to our travel counselors serving Platinum and Centurion card members with high-quality and efficient travel recommendations and insights. We've seen a 60-second reduction in call handling time by travel counselors so far. Customer satisfaction is higher because customers spend less time on a call, and the quality of the recommendations has improved. We currently have half of our travel counselors globally using this new capability and expect to reach 100% by year-end. The second example, GitHub Copilot, an AI coding assistant that aids with code generation and completions. Within the first months of deployment, our software engineers report an average of 10% time saved. We currently have this rolled out to 4,000 of our software engineers, and we'll roll this out to over 90% globally by the end of June.
Search Optimization makes semantic search possible and allows customers to find answers to their questions within the mobile app. This results in 9% fewer calls or chats following a search interaction as more customers digitally self-serve. In wrapping up this section, it is evident that our technology capabilities have continued to enable our company's growth. We are committed to continuous development of our platforms, enabling growth through our revenue-driving businesses and investing in new transformative technologies such as GenAI. Service excellence continues to be a core element of our brand promise and an important competitive advantage in our business model. It's an asset that has been built and strengthened over decades of delivering on our deep commitment to back our customers. By leveraging technology, we are able to enhance both the customer and the colleague experience.
We remain an industry leader for customer satisfaction among credit card companies in the U.S. As Steve mentioned earlier, we have won 13 of the last 17 J.D. Power Awards. While a growing number of interactions take place in digital channels, this results in the remaining call volume being more complex, more sensitive, and requiring a higher skill set. And this is where our 26,000 frontline customer care professionals and travel counselors play an important role, providing the special level of service that truly differentiates our customer service from the rest. Our service excellence elevates the customer's experience with American Express, which is a driver of satisfaction. For many years, we've measured customer satisfaction using Net Promoter Score, NPS, which is cited as the global standard of customer experience metrics across the industry, which I believe is on the previous slide.
This graph shows the U.S. consumers which answered the question for either American Express or one of over 20 providers, including banks and fintechs within the industry. They responded about their likelihood to recommend based on a specific interaction, such as paying a bill or disputing a charge. You can see that American Express has consistently performed well, as indicated by the numbers on this graph, which highlights the gap between American Express and the industry average. In order to execute upon our vision to provide the world's best customer experience every day, we must invest in cutting-edge tools and capabilities for our frontline colleagues so they, in turn, can provide world-class servicing experience to our customers. VIBES, which stands for Valuing Interactions by Evaluating Satisfaction, leverages natural language processing and AI to analyze customer satisfaction.
It provides a complete view monitoring the end-to-end customer experience through a chat or call. Previously, we measured customer satisfaction through surveys following a call that were entirely reliant on the customer returning that survey. From this method, we captured only feedback on approximately 8% of interactions. Using VIBES, we can assess the customer satisfaction on almost every interaction and can do this in nearly real time. Today, we measure interactions of approximately 9,500 customer care professionals and travel counselors serving U.S. customers and expect to extend this to other countries, reaching 12,000 by the end of 2024. Voice ID enables our colleagues to effectively and more seamlessly authenticate a customer's identity using voice biometrics, which can enhance our ability to verify our customers' identities. Customers now have a choice to use Voice ID to eliminate high-friction authentication methods that have historically contributed towards dissatisfaction for frequent callers.
This capability delivers fraud savings through early identification, supports the reduction of call handling time, and improves the customer's experience. Today, Voice ID has been deployed to approximately 8,000 customer care professionals in the U.S. and U.K. We plan to expand to Canada and Mexico this year. At that point, the capability will be enabled to support approximately 80% of global call volume. By using technology to enable service excellence, we have been able to continue to strengthen our reputation for service while driving growth and delivering efficiencies. To bring this all together, our next-gen servicing experience will improve efficiency through multi-channel servicing, a full view of a customer's relationship, leveraging artificial intelligence, VIBES, and Voice ID. This will reduce call handling time, decrease fraud losses, increase digital engagement, and when combined, are expected to result in increased customer satisfaction.
I hope this gives you a better understanding of how technology, digital, and servicing capabilities have contributed to the company's momentum and why we are confident we will continue to enable the company to achieve its long-term growth aspirations. I'd like you to take away three things from our presentation today in line with the central themes that Steve shared earlier. We have reduced servicing and technology operations expenses as a percentage of revenue, creating operating leverage and momentum for that to continue. We are leveraging technology to drive growth for the company, and are committed to consistently innovating through the continuous development of our core platforms and generative AI. Service excellence is one of our key competitive advantages, and we will continue to leverage technology to improve the customer experience and sustain our competitive edge. Thank you. And now I'd like to turn it over to our CFO, Christophe.
See you there.
Thank you, Anre. Good morning, everyone. It's great to be with you today. Over the last few hours, you've heard from the heads of our core businesses on how we aim to achieve our growth aspiration. My goal is to tie together what you've heard from a financial perspective, to help answer the question of why you should keep investing in American Express, and to explain how all of these strategies lay the foundation for our long-term aspiration of delivering annual revenue growth in excess of 10% and meeting EPS growth on a sustainable basis going forward. There are four key takeaways that I want to take you through today. First, we operate in a large, global, and expanding total addressable market. Second, we have a powerful shareholder value creation model that we continue to strengthen.
Next, we have laid the foundation for the building blocks of our long-term aspiration. And lastly, and perhaps most critical, we have a long track record of delivering superior returns and returning excess capital to shareholders, and we see a long runway for continued growth. I'll start with the first reason. The global electronic payments industry is an almost $700 billion revenue. Importantly, card payments, our core focus, makes up approximately 90% of that revenue pool. It has seen high single-digit growth over time, and we expect that it will continue to grow at high level in the coming years. Specifically, you can see an estimated average annual growth of 9% for billings and 7% for revenue growth through 2026.
When we break down the card payments opportunity into more detail, our focused geographies across the U.S. and our 15 largest international countries make up over 80% of the estimated total revenue pool. We focus on some of the fastest-growing segments historically within that revenue pool, such as premium consumers and younger age cohorts. We have a lot of opportunity to further grow our share. As we think about our long-term aspirations, all of this together provides us with a runway to deliver growth above the overall card industry going forward. We also operate in an industry that is remarkably resilient. On this slide, you can see U.S. card industry spend over the last two decades. While spend does dip during economic cycles, just like we saw during the Great Financial Crisis and the pandemic, it has always bounced back and then shows steady growth over time.
Let me walk you through the second key takeaway. We have a powerful shareholder value creation model, and importantly, we have continued to strengthen that model through the transformation and innovation in our business. Our model is grounded in our virtual cycle of growth, which Steve introduced earlier this morning. It starts by creating innovative and value propositions. This enables us to acquire, engage, and retain card members, attract merchants and partners, and then create operating leverage through scale and efficiencies. The framework that you see on this page lays out the many attractive features of this model and how they create value. For example, we have an integrated model that enables us to benefit from the economics of the entire payment ecosystem and creates a powerful network effect. Additionally, our business is tech-enabled, which creates continued efficiencies as we scale and as we digitize our processes.
We also have a large, attractive base of card members across our customer segments. Our focus on premium means that around 55% of the spend in our U.S. consumer segment comes from customers with an annual income over $200,000. For our U.S. small business, we are three times larger than our next competitor. And for our U.S. large and global corporations, 65 of the 100 largest U.S. public companies are American Express clients. This makes it attractive to partners to co-fund additional value for our card members, both embedded as part of our products and as targeted offers. On the left-hand side of this slide, you can see the percent of value funded by partners on our U.S. consumer and small business Platinum products and how we've grown this percentage since 2018.
Similarly, partner-funded value for redemption on our Amex Offers platform has also increased three times over the same time period, and you heard Raymond speak earlier about the significant opportunity we see ahead of us here. This gives our customers and partners even more reason to stay with us, and as a result, we can build long-term relationships with our partners and fuel our virtual cycle of growth. We build on this attractive franchise by continuing to invest in our industry-leading value propositions through an ongoing cadence of product innovation and refreshes.
When we refresh a product, we look to accomplish four things: drive increased demand for our premium products by strengthening the value and generating new news. Improve acquisition efficiency by having better products in market and by increasing the pool of attractive investments. Third, improve margins from adding additional value to our cards and pricing for that value. And lastly, drive continued high levels of retention of our card members. Our most important and most recent refresh of the consumer Platinum card in the U.S. in 2021 is a great example of this playbook. We doubled the amount of new accounts we acquired while maintaining the average risk profile of these new customers. We drove higher spend per new account of 18%. We increased the average profit of our existing accounts by 28%.
Importantly, we maintained the already high retention rate of 99% on our US consumer Platinum product after the fee increase. This is a great example of why we look to regularly refresh and enhance the value of our products. The power of our product refreshes is amplified by the engine we use to deploy our marketing dollars in an efficient way. We have sophisticated data-driven models that leverage the data that we get from our integrated model and our decades of historical performance. This led us to have an ever-evolving view of the lifetime value of card members across products, channels, and offers, and also to dynamically allocate our marketing dollars to our most attractive opportunities. This approach has driven increased returns and investment efficiency over time. Following the pandemic, we decided to increase our marketing spend by approximately 40%.
The spend from our new acquisitions increased even more than that by 60% over the same time period as we acquired more premium and higher spending card members through our most effective channels and across all our geographies. One of the benefits of our product and marketing strategy has been our ability to attract younger age cohorts to the franchise. As you heard Howard discuss, these younger customers have a greater expected average lifetime value, which comes with embedded growth opportunities for future years. For new U.S. consumer Platinum card members, we estimate that millennials, less than 30 years old, have an average lifetime value that is 1.8 times higher than Gen Xers acquired at the same time. That's even higher for Gen Z customers at 2 times.
Of course, we do not use age in our underwriting decisions, but it does inform how we build our products and source our partner benefits. Overall, younger age cohorts show greater engagement with our card benefits and digital servicing capabilities. Importantly, we expect they will bring higher overall growth opportunities as they age. Another example of how we have strengthened our model is the way in which we have transformed our funding sources over time. This has had a major impact on our economics and on NII growth. We launched our first direct-to-customer deposit program in 2009 with Amex Savings, and we have grown it diligently since then. Today, this funding channel is a very stable source of funding, and it has displaced more expensive channels such as asset-backed securities and unsecured loans.
We estimate that this change in funding mix since 2017 has driven a cost-of-fund savings and a corresponding net interest income benefit of almost $1 billion in 2023, assuming the same funding structure. All of these product and marketing decisions create the foundation for increased revenue growth on a sustainable basis. We expect this growth will come from both higher revenue growth from new customers acquired and higher organic growth from our tenured card members, especially from younger customers. Specifically, looking at our U.S. consumer and small business products, revenue from new customers acquired in the year was over 2 times higher in 2023 than in 2019. We continue to engage our card members after they have a full 12 months of spend with us, as you can see how revenue from our 2019 acquisition has grown from 2020 through 2023.
The stacking of these increasingly larger cohorts, together with a greater expected organic growth, is a key driver of our expectations for revenue growth in the future. Everything you just heard me walk through has helped lay the foundation for the building blocks of our long-term aspirations. Now, I'll walk you through those building blocks. Looking forward, we expect our revenue mix to continue to be predominantly driven by spend and fees. You can see here that we have seen only a modest increase in our NII as a percentage of our overall revenues compared to 2006. If you were to adjust our NII for the cost-of-fund savings that I just previously described, our NII mix in 2023 would decrease to 20% of our revenues.
Moreover, as you think about our NII growth, you can see on the right-hand side of this page that our asset growth in the U.S. when compared to 2019 has come almost entirely from fee-based products. These products include mostly our proprietary charge and co-brand products, which typically attract a higher credit quality customer. An important pillar of our diversified revenues is the subscription-like card fees that we earn from our customers. Here, you can see the strength of our card fee growth over time and how it has accelerated versus historically. We have seen double-digit net card fee revenue growth every year for the last six years, including through the pandemic. This is the combined result of our focus on acquiring premium card members, the multiple product refreshes we executed on, and the very high membership renewal rate from our tenured card members.
Taken together, our strategy gives us confidence in our ability to deliver our aspiration of revenue growth in excess of 10%. Here, we have laid out the building blocks that underpin that aspiration driven by strength across our three main diversified revenue streams: billing growth in a high single-digit growth industry; continued net card fee growth that is accretive to our total revenue growth; and lending to grow at a bit faster than spending driven mostly by our premium and tenured card members. Moving now to credit, we continue to drive best-in-class credit metrics, which we attribute to what I have discussed today: the high credit quality of our premium customer base, the positive selection created by our premium products and distribution channels, our robust data and risk management practices, and our discipline growth strategy.
When you look at our credit performance, we've grown card member loans and receivables in line with peers while increasing the distance to our peers in credit metrics since 2019. We have also significantly increased the quality of our portfolio over time. As a result, you can see how you can see that our portfolio looks very different today than it did in 2007, entering the Great Financial Crisis. 80% of our U.S. consumer and small business receivables are now on fee-based products. 70% of these receivables are from card members with a FICO above 720. And balance transfers play a de minimis role today in our asset base and acquisition strategy. The last component of the building blocks to our long-term aspiration is our resource allocation. The most important point to take away is that we have many levers available to drive operating leverage while still investing for growth.
We discussed our approach to product refreshes and marketing investments earlier. We use the product refresh cycle to optimize the VCE ratio to revenue at the product level. We maximize the return on our marketing investments by making profitability-based decisions at the margin. Let me highlight here how our global scale, combined with all of the technology and servicing efficiencies that Henri talked about, enables us to drive ongoing operating expense leverage. Over the last six years, we have reduced our operating expenses as a ratio to revenue by as much as five points. This is a major source of sustainable earnings growth, and we believe that there are more opportunities to come. Taking everything together, we believe we are well-positioned to deliver sustainable and accretive growth consistent with our long-term aspiration.
We have the building blocks to revenue growth in excess of 10%, best-in-class credit, and a lot of expense efficiencies driven by scale and technology while we continue to look for efficiencies in rewards and benefits. The last and perhaps most important takeaway is that we have a long track record of delivering superior returns, and we see a long runway for continuing our growth. We have an ROE that is over 30% and that remains strong even during the Great Financial Crisis. Additionally, the revenue and EPS growth that we are generating today is higher than the vast majority of the corporations that make up the S&P 500. Over the last few years, you've seen this performance both in terms of revenue and EPS growth. It is also worth highlighting the resilience of our business under stress. Here are the results of the 2022 CCAR process.
This is the last time we participated in this process. You can see here that the Federal Reserve Bank model, the American Express, was one of the most resilient of U.S. institutions under stress testing and also that we remain profitable under the severe economic scenario tested. I would also note that if you were to look at these results as a percentage of average assets, American Express has consistently been the top-performing bank in all years we were tested since 2014. Our flexible and resilient model has enabled us to deliver strong earnings through different economic environments and significantly accelerate earnings generation in recent years, which you can see on this slide. This has enabled us to consistently return capital to shareholders in a disciplined way. Like many institutions, we maintain our dividend during the Great Financial Crisis and the pandemic.
When we paused the share repo in 2020, we were able to restart the repo program immediately in 2021 when the Fed's restrictions were lifted. This disciplined capital management strategy starts with our strong capital position. We target a CET1 ratio between 10%-11%, which is well above our current regulatory minimum of 7%. On the right-hand side of this page, you can see the consistent increase in our capital and our continued share buyback, enabling our investors to gain a larger share of a growing business. Over the last six years, we have accelerated these results. We have significantly increased our scale, adding $24 billion of revenue, while increasing our gap-to-peers in credit performance. We have increased both our adjusted EPS and quarterly dividend by 70% over this time period.
Now, as we approach the end of the morning, you should hopefully have a greater sense from all the presenters for how our strategy has driven the transformation of our business and the breadth of opportunities for continued growth across each of these businesses. We believe that these opportunities create a long runway for growth in the future as we look to further differentiate our products, engage our card members, and drive increased efficiencies over time. Importantly, as we continue to grow, we remain focused on ongoing investments in our risk management, control, and compliance functions as we strive to deliver on our brand promise to our customers and shareholders. So why should you continue to invest in American Express?
Putting it all together, an attractive and growing industry, the power of our model, the way in which we have strengthened that model, and the long runway we see for continued growth. These factors drive our confidence in our long-term aspirations. Thank you all. And with that, I'll ask our presenters to join Steve and me up here on stage to take your questions.
All right. Well, thank you. Thank you for listening to 2.5 hours. And now it's your turn to talk. Well, let us get all set up here. And then Kartik will.
I'm missing a chair.
Do the honors and select our questioners.
Thanks, Steve. To ask a question in the audience, if you don't mind, please raise your hand. We have members of our team who will hand you a mic. You could just wait to get the mic so that we could have the questions heard clearly for our webcast. That would be great. I see a question there from Sanjay.
Thank you, Sanjay Sakhrani from KBW. Thank you for all the detail. So forgive me if you touched on a little bit of this. And I appreciate all the improvements and acceptance in the curve. And by the way, Raymond, thank you.
Let us know if you want a mystery shot.
I will. So I guess there's a lot of detail on the Millennial and Gen Z penetration you guys have. I'm just wondering how to think about it as it filters through in terms of the portfolio composition over the next 5-10 years. How should we think about it as a tailwind to revenue growth? And then I have one for Anna as well.
Okay. So I'm going to have Howard answer that question. But I think that the key thing that Howard laid out is the 20 years, right? The extra 20 years and thinking about that lifetime value just increasing. And so as that base continues to increase for us, it's going to be a huge tailwind. But where is Howard? There he is, right in the middle.
I think I'd come back to some of the stats we talked about today. So on the front end for platinum and gold acquisition, 75% of all new customers are Millennial and Gen Z customers. You combine that with the stat that Steve just talked about, which is 20+ more years of relationship with those customers and 2 times more lifetime value. So as you do the math associated with how those customers have already for the last several years and for the most recent years filter through our portfolio, we think that there is a healthy and high momentum associated with the tailwind they provide from a growth perspective. The other piece, as we've talked about, is these are a generation of customers that never knew the charge was a pay-in-full product and on day one never experienced anything other than parity coverage.
And so you have the added benefit of the way in which they use those card products on day one that also layers on what I would say is a tailwind for growth.
Just before you get to Anna's question, the last point is one of the slides that Howard had up was the acquisition of Millennials in 2019 to 2023, how the spending has doubled versus the other cohort. So think about that doubling and then think about the 20 years. And that provides a big tailwind. And that should add more organic growth to that constituency over time.
There's no way to dimensionalize that 10% over the next five years and say half of it's coming from that penetration improving or those cohorts becoming a bigger part of the total.
Well, there is. We're just not sharing.
All right. Fine. Anna, I had a question about SMB acquisition. It sounds like you're not as concerned about the fintechs anymore. You're competing quite aggressively with them. But you're seeing a lot of vertical SaaS players get into SMB acquisition and doing all sorts of financial services and card-based products. Are you worried about that? I mean, how are you combating that? I mean, isn't it becoming a bigger part of that ecosystem? Maybe you could just talk about embedded finance broadly, too. But I just thought I'd ask that question in terms of customer acquisition.
Yeah. Well, it's super encouraging that everybody believes in the small business growth opportunity. There's no shortage of competition out there, whether it's our traditional competitors or the fintechs. I talked about the fact that we've slightly gained share in U.S. small business cards over the last few years, that 45.8%-47.1% share. But we have a healthy degree of paranoia about all that competition. 33% of small business payments are still made via checks. That's ridiculous. It's very inefficient. There are a lot of players attacking that opportunity in terms of making it easier for small businesses to pay and get paid. We see it across the universe that you described. I also highlighted this program we have called Amex Sync, which is a series of very standardized APIs that enable us to plug, for example, virtual card capabilities into some of these platforms.
Because a lot of the platforms are saying to us now, a few years ago, we thought cards were easy. Maybe we'll just do our own card. But the fact that they can get a virtual card capability from us and they can focus on the software interface, which is what they do best, we believe that's a great way to play in the opportunity.
So just to add on to that, I think as Anna just said, partnership opportunities are really important. And I think you can learn from them as well. And I think that's been a big opportunity for us as well. As we look at what other players are doing, given our scale, given our share, taking some of their innovation and incorporating it within, we're not shy about doing that either.
We know we need to invest. That Anre's presentation about technology investment plays into it as well.
Our next question up there, Ryan at Goldman.
Hello, everyone. Ryan Nash, Goldman Sachs. Steve, on one of the slides in U.S. Consumer, you showed you guys have 25% share of fee-based accounts. You're growing 8%. The industry is growing 8%. If you look at certain markets, right? So you got 47% share in small business. International is growing real fast. So there's clearly a runway to grow at a faster pace. How do you think about the opportunity set in just the total fee-paying cards as you look both domestically and internationally? And is there a desire to, Christoph, show this on his slide, to potentially invest more? And can that inevitably lead to even faster growth?
Yeah. So look, I think when you look at the overall opportunity set, we talked about an industry that's growing revenue at 7%. We talked about the premium segment growing a little bit faster than that. We talked about Millennial and Gen Z growing faster than that. When you looked at Rafa's presentation, I think we had revenue growing at 6%. And then you continue to go. And so I think what it basically says is, look, that's a healthy industry overall. But we are playing in absolutely the right segments. And to your point about investing more, if you go back to 2019 or so when the marketing investment was a lot lower than it is now, that investment has continued to increase. It increased in 2021. It increased last year. It'll increase this year. But I think what's important and this gets back to the aspiration.
We set an aspiration of 10% revenue growth. We set an aspiration of mid-teens EPS growth. When you look at those two, they have to work in concert. So we're not going to get 10% revenue growth at 2% EPS growth. We're not going to get 14% revenue growth and drive that. So we have to balance those two. So is there an opportunity to invest more? I think there's always an opportunity to invest more. But I think we also have to take into account what our investors are looking for. I think one of the key things investors are looking for is EPS growth. I think that's why it was important to put that aspiration out there because it allows us to chase scale.
Yes, chase scale, but not losing out the fact that we have a responsibility to our shareholders to deliver value back to them. Christoph just showed how we return capital in terms of the dividend has doubled over the last six years. We continue to buy back more shares.
As my follow-up, you spend a lot of time talking about the membership model. You can't see that anywhere better than in card fees, which have grown double digits for the last six years. I think there was a slide where you showed differing prices across different countries. I'm curious, do you see any major differences in customer behavior, whether it's at renewals or something, as you move up different absolute levels? Or is this just all about continuing to enhance the value proposition? Thank you.
Look, it's all about continuing to enhance the value proposition. Christoph had a slide up which showed the refresh of the platinum card in 2021, right? Doubly the amount of cards that were acquired, 18% billings growth, 28% net income revenue growth, and 99% retention. So people will stick with you if you're adding value. It's not about raising the fee for raising the fee's sake. Howard talked a lot about the membership model. Rafa talked about the differentiation in markets, right? There are markets outside the United States that we actually have higher fees than the platinum card. Because you've asked this question, how high can it go? It can go as high as the value you provide. This is where the virtuous cycle comes in.
Because the more premium customers we bring to our merchant partners, the more they're going to want to invest with us and the more value we will deliver.
Great. Thanks. Craig, down here.
Batting third . It's not a bad spot.
Set up for the cleanup hitter. Anyway, so wanted to ask first question on international. You showed separately very strong growth in SMEs that use your card product internationally and very strong growth in international acceptance. But how do those two drive each other? Is there crosstalk between the groups so that maybe you get an SME to take a card, but they're not accepting Amex yet? How do you leverage that or the other way around?
Let Rafa start. Then Raymond can go.
Listen, small business is probably the fastest growing that we have in international, but also is the one with the longest runway to continue to grow at a very fast pace. We have a focused strategy to participate in the countries where we can make a difference in that segment. And I think that both our value proposition resonates especially well with this segment, particularly non-preset spending limit and the ability to actually capture more volatile spend levels. It's really valuable. We also are focused on driving not only the everyday type of business spend on categories that we have normal acceptance, but we also have strong focus on capturing B2B spend. And we have probably the best success stories in our largest markets in international as well in that segment. I think that that serves as a segue for.
So to drive acceptance, those merchants need to see card members at the point of sale. So we work very hard not only to sign, but then we work and putting details up, whether it's online or in the window. But we work very hard with all of the issuing businesses around the globe to make sure that those card members are aware of those coverage gains. The only thing I'd add is, especially in the B2B space, whether it's here in the U.S., the commercial team and the merchant team, and certainly in many of Rafa's markets where they're targeted, the integrated approach to know who are the buyers that are out there and where are their suppliers, and how can we work together to come up with the right product at the right price point.
To Anna's comment about 33% is still done in cash across international, the opportunity is measured in the trillions of dollars. That's why everybody's rushing in there. We work very, very closely to make sure that we're coming up with the right merchant price point and the value product, card product, to make sure that we can capture the spend in those areas. Japan's a great example where I think we've seen tremendous growth in the SME space by partnering together.
Thanks. Steve, question for you. There's potentially some material changes coming with the settlement that Visa and Mastercard have agreed to with the small merchants and the changes that can bring to surcharging card acceptance and the Capital One Discover deal, which could create a new largest player by far in this space, plus another closed-loop network. So thoughts on those changes coming and how Amex deals with that?
Well, right now, they're all in play, but have not come to fruition yet. So I think when you look at the Capital One Discover potential combination, it will create the largest lender in the United States, not necessarily the largest billings. And it's a very different customer base. In fact, it's a little bit of a compliment that they want to recreate the closed-loop network. But it just takes a little bit more than just putting two things together. But look, Rich is a really smart guy. And the fact that he wanted to do this is, I think, a compliment to just how our network works. But he's publicly stated he's probably only going to move about 14% of his volume over there. So we'll see how it plays out. But it really doesn't change our strategy. We'll still go after coverage. We play in a premium set.
And so we'll see how all that plays out. As far as the Visa and Mastercard settlement, this has been going on forever. You just had the National Retail Federation come out against it this morning. So again, we'll see how all that plays out. It is five basis points. It's a pause for five years. With all the pricing tables, we'll have to see how all that also plays out in the marketplace. In fact, it does play out. But as far as surcharging goes, look, surcharging is a bad experience for consumers. We want to raise your prices, raise your prices. But the credit card industry plays a vital role, I think, in providing the liquidity into the system so that people can make purchases. We'll see how that all winds up playing out if, in fact, it comes through.
I think regulators and consumer advocacy groups should really look at surcharging and understand what the impact of that is to the consumer experience.
Thanks. Steve, down here. Christina, thanks.
Hi. I just wanted to follow up on Ryan's question about the 25% share of fee-based premium cards, I think it was. Do you think that there's a level upon which you can't exceed, whether it's 30%, 50%? I mean, how are you thinking about that? Because obviously, there are other players in the market, whether it's JPMorgan or other entrants that are getting a little bit more active, like Wells Fargo recently. Just how are you thinking about that?
Well, what I'd say, and then I'd ask Howard to comment, there's still a tremendous long runway for growth. I mean, are we going to get 100%? No. But there is still a long runway for growth here. And look, when Chase came out with their product a number of years ago, it really put a spotlight on its entire market. And we've grown a lot faster as a result of it. I mean, that was like 2017. And we really just took off since then. But I think there's still a long runway for growth with that. It's hard to put a percentage on it. But Howard?
I think the only thing I'll add is sort of emphasizing a point that Steve talked about. I think that in many respects, the way in which competitors and issuers have begun to focus in earnest in the premium space has, in fact, accelerated the size of the pie of the market. So every time that one of our competitors announces a new lounge as a category leader, we disproportionately benefit. You see how they talk about their lounge introduction. And then there's a paragraph on the suite of global lounge networks for American Express. And so I think that while that 25% number is a point-in-time number, it doesn't currently or accurately describe how the pie around it is growing at an accelerated pace.
As we see Capital One, as well as JPMorgan Chase, continue to lean in and invest, we would suggest that the market will continue to accelerate growth, educate, and bring more customers up into the premium segment, which is exactly what we're seeing today.
Bill?
Thanks. Good morning. Bill Carcache with Wolfe Research. I wanted to follow up on the significant increase in appetite among your customers to fund value. Amex has always been a premium brand with premium customers. But what's been the catalyst to sort of increase their appetite to fund more value over the years? And as you look forward, Christoph, you had that slide that showed the value funded by partners. How much room is there as you look forward for that to continue to potentially drift higher?
So 1.5, Christoph, Christoph's supposed to be sitting next to me. But what happened? Anyway, switch. Christoph, why don't you just talk about that? And then Raymond, talk about what we do with the merchants.
Yeah. So that percentage varies by product. But the example I gave on that slide was for the platinum, U.S. Platinum, and small business platinum. It's very hard to predict what's going to happen. I think every time we refresh a product, we contemplate what the new value proposition should be, what it could do, how we price for it, what's the appetite from the partner. So every product refresh is a catalyst for exactly that kind of conversation. It happens at that moment. And then we live with that product and that construct for several years. I think the key thing to understand here is the relationship between the attractive base. I had a slide as well referring to the consumer base, for instance, in the U.S., where 55% of the billing comes from card members who have income in excess of $200,000. That's what they want, right?
They want exposure. They want access. They want the direct relationship with that base of customer. The product is the way to get there, right? So we're just certainly going to keep doing it. It's working for the partners. It's working for the card members. It's working for us. It's working for everybody.
So I'd say beyond the embedded value that's a core part of the value propositions, the Amex Offers platform really taps into kind of a core theme of all businesses want to find new customers. And they want to deepen the loyalty with existing ones. And I think the differentiated assets I had a slide up there that highlighted. We have tens of millions of high-spending card members around the globe. We have the integrated business model, which can combine the closed-loop information so we can target a lot more efficiently and effectively to help meet that partner's needs. And we pass all of the value right now onto the card member. I think Steve had the slide of the virtuous cycle where we're not charging them for advertising. We're putting that value to reinforce the value that they're paying for the card product. So the card member wins.
The merchant sees this as a super efficient way to advertise. It's very differentiated in terms of the returns that they can get on that spend. It's been super powerful. We recognize that we have a bigger opportunity. We're investing over the next two years to revamp the platform to make it even easier for merchants to be able to advertise in that space. We're excited about the opportunity for the future as well. Thanks.
Thank you. Anna and Raymond, I believe you touched on the role of APP and the penetration of payments. There's been a lot of focus over the years around the challenges of penetrating B2B payments. You've talked about AP automation and a lot of the things that you're doing. Could you speak to where we are on that journey and sort of the opportunity that you see sort of over the course of the next three to five years and beyond and just frame for us?
All right. Anna, why don't you start and take the mic away from Bill? Thank you.
It's lovely to see you, Bill. Great to be here. So absolutely. I said in my presentation that what small businesses want is to use their card at scale. We enable that with features like no preset spending limit. But a key thing we have to do to enable it is also to ensure the card is accepted at their largest suppliers. And Raymond and my team, we do that with technology, as you pointed out, capabilities like AP automation.
But there's also just a constant drumbeat between Raymond and my organization of capturing the accounts payable file from the buyer, feeding it into a center of excellence that we have between our organizations that filters those supplier leads, and then getting it into one of the colleagues in Raymond's team that reaches out to that supplier, gets them on board, and then broadcasts back to all of our card members, hey, this supplier now accepts American Express. And so I feel good about the machinery you've put in place. But I still think there's a lot of potential. And we talk a lot about how you make sure the value proposition on both the buyer and the supplier side is really sharp. So buyer side, paying with the card is a great thing to do. You get float. You get rewards. You get purchase protection in many cases.
On the supplier side, there's also a great value proposition, right? You get the certainty of the receivable. You get cash flow acceleration. And you get data. And so those two hands clapping between buyer and supplier, we feel good about our progress. But there's still a lot we're doing together. I don't know if you'd want to add.
Well, I think what is also driving is the recognition that we also need to look at those value propositions, whether it's cards or other types of payments. What we want to make sure we can do is process that buyer's complete buyer file, the supplier file. And many of them accept today. Some of them don't, making sure that we can process it. And then that gives us warm leads to go out. So we do work hand in hand to make sure that we can penetrate it in the U.S. But it's also an opportunity across international. And sometimes in the U.S., we're probably a little more buyer-led. Some markets, I think it's been even more supplier-led. The supplier sees a lot of benefits because they can get paid with certainty.
Then we go out and sign up their buyers to make sure that we can provide value to both. So really, it gets down to the customer needs and making sure that we have the right solutions to solve both sets of needs. It's a massive opportunity. It's an opportunity measured in the $ trillions.
Jeff Adelson, down here.
Hey, Jeff Adelson, Morgan Stanley. Christoph and Steve, just wanted to focus on slide 165 where you gave the write-off metric for fee-paying cards. I don't think you've ever given that before. So it was really good to see that stat. Just curious, what does that look like over time? And given that, I think in a later slide, you showed 80% of your U.S. loans and receivables are now fee-paying. Do you see further opportunity for that to kind of remix in as you continue to premiumize the portfolio? Or is that opportunity more cap for now?
Yeah. The way I'm going to answer this question, I don't know whether it will help you. But we're not trying to lower this number. We need to find the right balance between all the growth ambition that we have and taking the appropriate level of risk. And the way we think about this level of credit cost, if you want, it's a cost of doing business given where we are, the industry where we are. We approve every single transaction that we deem as profitable. And we decline every single transaction that we deem as unprofitable for us. And the write-off rate that you see here is the blend and the outcome of all these transactions. So our key focus is to grow as much as we can while declining as many nonprofitable transactions. And that will be the driver of where that write-off rate is going to go.
What we know as well is that the more premium card members we bring on and one test for the premiumness is whether they buy into this membership value proposition, they pay the card fee, and they engage with the product. We know that premium card members over time will always do better than non-premium card members. So that's how we handle it, right? So I'm not going to be able to tell you where this is going and whether that write-off rate of 2% is going to become like the portfolio write-off rate of 2% is going to move to like 2.1, 2.2, or 1.9 because that's not the way we think about it.
You know, it's Christoph's point, though, about the buying into the value proposition. If you remember the slide that Howard put up, I don't remember the number of the slide. But if you remember the slide that Howard put up, showed that when somebody's delinquent on both products, how there's a difference in terms of how they pay us back in their smaller delinquency, the lower delinquency rate versus their other card.
And as my follow-up, Anré, thanks for highlighting the AI slide there. I was curious, do you see AI from here continuing to increase as a % of tech spend? Or do you view yourself as fully at run rate here? What other opportunities or use cases do you see for AI? And is this a driver of improving operating leverage? Or is it really just all about maintaining your operating leverage from that?
OK. Well, generative AI is something that's only been around for about a year or so. We think it's transformational technology that has tremendous potential for the payments industry and a lot of other industries that's going to impact the world. When we put together our GenAI Council internally, we asked for suggestions and use cases throughout our colleague base globally. We had about 500 use cases that were suggested. We've only implemented a few dozen of them. But we think there's tremendous opportunity. What I highlighted today, which is three of them that have been successful, we'll keep trying things, the things that we think make sense and have opportunity to help our company. We'll expand on them. But I believe these are early days. We've been at AI, as I said, going back to, I think, it's 2010 or so.
And so that was a long run; has been a long run rate. Generative AI is brand new. And I think it has tremendous potential. And we highlighted one area, which is about productivity. But then there's also a growth area. And there's also protecting our products and services and our fraud losses and other things. So we see a lot of potential for it. And we're not going to stop investing. I mean, I think one of the things that you've seen over the last few years that's been transformational for us is our ability and our willingness to invest when there's opportunities. I mean, we've almost doubled our marketing investment. You saw Anré had a slide up of $600 million on our tech investment. So we're not going to trade off new opportunities versus continuing to upgrade and enhance our existing systems.
If the returns are there and it drives more operating leverage, drives more revenue, whatever it drives, we'll make those investments. Because I think the most important thing for us is we run the company for the long term. And so for us to make a short-term decision of not investing in an opportunity that's going to make a difference in the long term just doesn't make any sense. So as those opportunities arise, we'll evaluate them. And if we need to invest more, we'll invest more.
Thank you. Don Fandetti.
Thank you. So, Anré, can you talk a little bit? I mean, SME spend has been a little bit sluggish relative to Consumer International. Are you seeing any inflection in any industries, any green shoots on that? And then I noticed that the digital banking, one of the strongest growth rates I've seen all today, was the SME digital banking. Can you talk about sort of how that's progressing in your multi-product approach? Do you feel like you can continue to maintain this sort of strong market share gap?
Great. So what I wanted to do in the presentation today was really kind of lift the lid on those small business spend trends we've seen over the last few years. There's a lot going on. And my favorite slide in the deck, that slide 47, I think it is, which shows small business organic spend, we put the absolute numbers on the bottom, which are really almost more interesting than the percentages. Pre-pandemic, in 2019, we had about $9 billion of organic spend growth from our small business customers. And then in 2021, it was $53 billion. In 2022, it was $45 billion. So that surge was just so enormous on the back of all the externalities I talked about, stimulus, inflation, supply chain. And there were also industry dynamics, both in the boom and in the moderation.
And although the spend was very broad-based, the industry that stands out for us is very obviously construction, right? So it boomed a lot just post-pandemic. I mean, everyone put a new roof on their house. And then they didn't need a new roof in 2023. And we saw that spend contract. So that's the only real industry move there. Broadly, it was all that external stimulus followed by the tightening that happened with both continued inflation and interest rates. So that's the spend story. And then when it comes to products beyond the card, as we call it, we really are excited about those products' ability to continue to engage and drive growth within the customer base, which is why on the slide, I put up some of our engagement metrics, more than like number of customers or revenue. So you see them as really important points of engagement.
Our ability to surround customers with more of that multi-product experience, it grows revenue. It also reduces attrition. We're going to keep embedding those products into the customer base to continue to drive that growth.
Are you seeing anything competitively? I know Capital One has a no-limit card that's been sort of a secret sauce for Amex. Do you feel like you can maintain this sort of dominant market share?
So Steve talked about how we never rest on our laurels. We have a really healthy sense of paranoia inside the company. And there are a lot of great competitors out there. We've competed successfully against those other big issuers for decades now. We've competed successfully through a real period of kind of small business volatility. And we're going to keep running our playbook and competing from our strengths to make sure we continue to hold our share. So that's where we're staying focused.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Go ahead. Saul Martínez, down here.
Hi. Saul Martínez, HSBC. You tell a really convincing story about how you can drive better than industry volume growth, better than industry revenue growth, drive operating leverage. But what could go wrong in terms of getting to that algorithm that gets you to 10% revenue growth, 15% EPS growth? If you had to rank order three, four, five things that you think are the biggest risks that keep you up at night, what would they be?
So it's not only a story. It's actually happened, right? So that's number one. I mean, I think that would be an interesting story, except we've done it for the last three years. There's a multitude of things that keep us up at night: a pandemic, a financial crisis. We've got a world that is being torn apart in many, many places. So as Anré said, we have a healthy paranoia about everything. But I think that I'll just go back to Christophe's slide. Even in the depths of great despair and the great financial crisis, we made money. And if you look at a financial crisis, you look at a pandemic, we're not going to hit 10% revenue growth. And we're not going to hit mid-teens EPS growth. But nobody is. But what we've proven is we'll make money. We've made money in a pandemic.
We made money in the great financial crisis. I think that as far as hitting the 10% aspiration and hitting the mid-teens EPS growth, it's all about execution for us. It really is all about execution. This team and the people that work for the people on this team are maniacally focused on executing our strategy in a compliant way. We've been able to do that very successfully. That's what we're going to continue to do because the opportunities are really in front of us. Look, we live in a world of so much uncertainty. We've lived through so much uncertainty. I think when you have those cataclysmic events and I think those were cataclysmic events, nobody's going to hit any of their targets. Then it's a matter of the sustainability of the organization. Do we have the liquidity?
Do we have the right capital? We've proven we have. And we continue to strengthen not only our capital position and our liquidity position but our ability to know what our capital and liquidity position is as well. So yeah. But things as where we are, we think our aspiration is absolutely the right aspiration of 10% revenue growth and mid-teens EPS growth. And that's what we're going to continue to strive for.
Please raise your hand if you want to ask a question. I'll take James Hanna right here.
Hi. It's James Hanna with North Reef Capital. I appreciate Saul's question and the spirit of it because it is a very good financial algorithm. I'm going to ask Steve, Christoph, Anré, and Anré; one of you maybe can help me answer this one because I know your face is better. In terms of just thinking about that new aspiration, it is a little bit confusing the last few years. American Express has done a great job describing the revenue dynamics, spending trends, what's happened post-COVID between business and consumer. But if I think of Saul's question, one thing that I worry about is maybe the management team, when you came up with 10% aspiration, is basing it off four years where the consumer was actually in a pretty darn good spot, especially your customer base. So I know you all are thoughtful in thinking about these things.
But how do you know that, for example, card fees and the refresh that we point to in 2021, that was a pretty big step up in card fees? A lot of customers across all geographies in the pandemic were spending money a little bit more loosely, maybe not as focused on what they were spending on. I know you guys think about that. And you have data that can help me kind of bridge this gap. But how do you know that the last few years weren't just a really good time? And now we have a revenue expectation out there that's a little bit higher. Just if there's anything that maybe you can walk me inside baseball how you guys thought about setting that?
Well, I think it goes back to the end of 2017. We were growing at 9% in 2018 and 2019. And that was before what you've described as this wild spending spree that was going on for the last few years. So we were at 9% those two years. And we had really just started to ramp up our marketing investment at that point in time, our tech investment at that point in time, and our focus on becoming a revenue growth company. And then when you looked at 2020, our revenue went down, what, 17%? And then back in 2021, we popped that up at 17%. And I think we learned a lot during the pandemic. And what we learned during the pandemic is we needed to expand the organic value propositions that we had. And we did it.
We also learned that if you took care of your customers, which we did, that they'll stay with you. And so I think I've been here a long time, almost 40 years. And I remember when we used to raise card fees just because we needed more revenue. We didn't add anything. But that's not how we operate. I mean, we just did a refresh of Delta Reserve. We raised the price by $100 and added $500 of value. And consumers were a lot more savvy today than they were even five, six, seven years ago. And listen, if I'm going to pay $695, I'm going to pay $795. I want more value. And so why wouldn't you do that? There's a reason you put money in the market. You want it to grow. Well, if I can invest $695 and get $1,400, I might as well do that.
So when you take the 10% and you put it in context of that 9%, it really isn't all that great of a leap. And so what we did do, though, to your point, we did take advantage of this sort of spending that happened over those last two years. Anré had it on her slide with the 19%, 18% from a small business perspective. We saw that from a consumer, which enabled us to drive revenue at 25% and 14.5%. And so as we came up with that aspiration, we knew we could build off of what we did in 2021, in 2022, and 2023. We exceeded our own expectations in 2022 because, remember, we said 2018 to 2020 wound up at 25%.
And then as we moved into this and the reason we did the investor day today, not today, but this year, is because we wanted to reinforce the fact, and hopefully, we have reinforced that fact, that that 10% aspiration is the right aspiration. And I think you have to bookend it. You've got to bookend the 9% with the 10%. Then you look at the model. Then you look at the algorithm. And it's not that wild at this point, especially when you think about the segments that we play in. We've got a 7% revenue growth. And we're playing in consumer premium, which is growing faster, and millennial and Gen Z. Going back to Sanjay's original question this morning, what's that runway for growth? And then going to Howard's slide, you've got 20 years more of lifetime value. In a 5-year period, they're doubling their spending.
Think about that as more same-store sales. Then what we didn't have on any of the slides today, when you go back to the fourth quarter of 2019, we had 19% of our spending was millennial and Gen Z. In the last quarter, it's 32%. So we're growing with the right people. Their spending grew 15% in the last two quarters. So we feel pretty confident about it. Saul, to your question, lots of things that could go wrong in the world at large. But I think in terms of where we are, it's our ability to execute against that and to make sure we stay ahead of the competition. That's what we're focused on. That's what you have to trust this management team to do.
OK.
I'm really glad I asked the question. Thank you.
Oh, was that helpful?
It was perfect.
OK. Well, it was all on the prompter back there.
All right. I think we're coming to a close. Steve, do you want to do one more question?
Yeah. We can do one more.
We'll do one more question if you don't mind raising your hand again. Maybe I'll take the gentleman who's right here.
Hi. John Gallo with BNP Paribas. I appreciate all the color on spending ramps with Gen Z and millennial customers. Could you talk a little bit about the lend portion of the journey there? And by that, what I mean by that is how fast does this movement from spend to lend come today versus the past? And once they're revolving their loans, how quickly are these customers growing their share of lend wallet with Amex now? And I have a follow-up if we have the time.
Yeah. I think as we talked about today, and I want to be and it's a great opportunity to emphasize the clarity of our strategy, which is it's a premium-focused strategy starting first with 77% of all new customers that join the American Express franchise are on fee-paying products. And by their very nature, as Christoph said, that's a proxy, as you see, for the premium, high-credit quality of customers that we're attracting that filter through the base. The second piece, as we talked about, is 70% of all of our lending-related growth is targeted against the existing installed premium customer base we have that, more importantly, we know really, really well.
We can be targeted and specific around those customers that we know have about close to 75% of their lending on other cards in their wallet and use the product, the value proposition, to encourage them to move that lending on. As a result, when you filter that through, it translates into industry-leading credit performance that is not only industry-leading pre-COVID, but as you saw, we've widened that lending gap between us and our industry competitors. We are, because of the size of off-us lending opportunity, remain committed to sticking to that very same premium lending strategy.
Great. Appreciate all the color. My follow-up is on international loan opportunity. Sorry. Have you guys talked about structural return on equity outside the U.S.? If we're able to grow the international portion of the business more, bigger portion of the mix, is there an opportunity for return on equity to go higher or the risk of it going lower?
So we don't report ROE by segment. We think about it enterprise-wide also because it gets very complicated. You have a merchant side. You have an issuing side. And so we focus on the enterprise view. What I would say, though, is that the returns in international are very attractive because, as Rafael pointed on some of his slides, it tends to be a more premium portfolio. The brand is a bit more premium and international. You've seen some of the card fee that we have in Japan, in Mexico. So the returns are super, super attractive. And as a result, we invest a lot in international. And it remains a fantastic opportunity for us.
All right. So I want to thank everybody spending a little bit over 3 hours with us. Thank you for your continued interest in American Express, for the analysts that cover us, and for the investors. Thanks for your continued investment in our company. And we appreciate it. Thank you very much.