Start with the state of the consumer, but I felt that there was so much going on with your company that we should really just start there and maybe focus there. So what the first thing I want to unpack is that you mentioned during the earnings call that several things have moved since you announced the Discover acquisition, but you still expect earnings power on the other side of the Discover integration to be consistent with what you expected at deal announcement. Could you double-click on that for us in terms of what has turned out to be better or worse in terms of Discover and Capital One earnings power?
So thank you, and thanks everybody for coming here and for those listening in on the webcast. So we announced the deal at the beginning of 2024. It seems like a long time ago. You know, we had, you know, high hopes and expectations about the earnings power of our combination on the other side of the integration, and we continue to have those high hopes. A lot of things have moved along the way in different directions. Let's just savor a few of those. What I call the brownout of growth for Discover, which was driven by some of the credit pullbacks that they did and some trimming around the edges on their credit policies that we have done.
By the way, so that's been, you know, a headwind. But then on the other side, that's also contributed to credit coming in a little better than we expected. So that's been a good year. Margins have been a little stronger than we expected, you know, early on. When we think about some of the drivers of the positive margin trajectory, bringing the whole Walmart portfolio in-house helped with respect to margins. The retail deposit growth has been higher than we expected. That's beneficial on the margin side as well.
The other big thing that's happened along the way is the growth in opportunities that we see at Capital One. And opportunities are very exciting things, but they also require quite a bit of investment. And so we have been saying to investors that when we look at the full opportunity set, a bunch of it actually brought by Discover, but also much of it really the product of years of work at Capital One. We're very excited by the opportunities, but it requires a lot of investment.
So we're leaning in even more than usual into investments at Capital One. And then along comes Brex, and we see that as a great opportunity. But we also, a key reason for the deal is the chance for Capital One to lean in and bring more resources and more investment into Brex. So when we pull up on all of these things that have moved in different directions, the more things change, the more they stay the same in a sense because we feel that the earnings power coming out the other side of integration is pretty consistent with what we thought going in a couple of years ago.
Thank you for that. So you mentioned Brex, and, you know, during the earnings call, you made a very clear case for the benefits of the acquisition and how this advances your agenda in terms of growth in business payments. I think maybe the investor base needs to continue to appreciate how unique and helpful is, you know, to growth is Brex in terms of having an in-house, fully modern core versus maybe peers that have a third-party tech solution.
So we have always admired Brex from the outside. We never really thought that we would be in a position to actually be combining as companies. But as we have gotten to know them more, we are electrified by what they have built. And when you think about any startup, it is just such a tough thing to start a company and, you know, trying to make it through every day and have the money, you know, on the other side and drive growth as you invest. It's a choice almost every startup makes is to try to get as much help as they can from other companies to, you know, build their tech solutions. It's a very natural thing.
It's shocking to me and to our team how Brex was able to build a full vertically integrated tech stack all the way down to the core. You know, it was striking to us. And we, of course, have gone on a parallel journey since our tech transformation began in 2013 where we have rebuilt our whole tech stack from the bottom up. But along the way, it makes us even more reverential to see those who have made those choices. But why are we so excited to see a company like Brex that has made that choice and live to tell about it?
When you have your own tech stack, the flexibility that you have, the control of your own destiny in a world where the world is moving so fast, the need to adapt, the need to innovate, when you have your own vertically integrated tech stack, that is a very special thing. Otherwise, one is reliant on the roadmap of your partners along the way.
But also the cybersecurity associated with having your own tech stack and the ability to stand on the shoulders of that stack and now add other business vectors and opportunities, it's really been the quest of our company. And now to be able to take Brex with their vertically integrated tech stack and combine it into Capital One with ours is especially a powerful combination. So I'm just really pretty awed by the choices that Brex has made and what they have built.
So Rich, if I could shift over to the state of the Capital One consumer. You know, in the fourth quarter, year-over-year, standalone growth in outstandings was about 3.3%. How would you peg consumer confidence at this point? Is there a telling difference by cohort? And do you think card outstanding growth could reaccelerate from that 3.3%?
You know, the one word I would use to describe the consumer these days and everything we observe at Capital One is the word stable. So if we let's just start with the, you know, sort of from a macro point of view. Despite all the noise in the economy, things are pretty stable. You know, unemployment inched up a little bit, but it's, you know, at relatively low levels on a historical basis. The, you know, job basically while there's this striking thing going on and there's very little people losing their jobs and very little sort of new job creation. So it's at a stable but odd place in terms of the velocity of movement within it has slowed down. But, you know, wage growth, real wage growth is still positive. Spending is robust.
So on the other hand, obviously, inflation is still at levels that, you know, are not where the Fed wants them to be. So there are reasons to be concerned about the economy. But overall, I think it's a fairly stable economy that the consumer finds themselves in. Now, when we look at our portfolio, it is, here is how I would summarize, like, on the credit card side. Starting in mid-2024, on a seasonally adjusted basis, delinquencies continued to improve all the way till approximately August of 2025. And then ever since, it's been flat.
And that's why we see a very stable situation. Now, Erica, when you ask about how is it for different segments within our portfolio, a lot of people ask, you know, how are people at the lower end, lower income, lower FICO, how are they doing relative to the rest?
I'd start with a principle that we've seen for years and years. The people at the lower end are usually first in and first out when the economy changes. So when we go all the way back to the financial crisis, they were the canaries in the coal mine. And then coming out, they actually healed strikingly well. We then went into COVID. They were the first. They showed dramatic improvements. Of course, there was a lot of government stimulus and loan forbearance going on. But the most improving group was the sort of lower FICO, lower income.
Now, when I say lower income within Capital One, that's not, you know, describing necessarily the lowest income in the economy. But anyway, then after COVID, credit started normalizing and losses were going up. And the very first group to level out and fully normalize was again at the lower end. Where we are right now in the context of what I would call stable overall in our portfolio is that each of the segments are doing pretty much the same. Just another sign of the stability that we see.
You know, given your statements on stability, is this growth level sort of what to expect for standalone?
Oh, sorry. Sorry, I didn't answer your question about growth. I'm so sorry. So if we think about credit card growth, just think about industry growth. You know, there was a great shrinking that went on during COVID. People pulled back. They stopped spending. And then there was this, you know, amazing growth of the card business for a few years on the other side of COVID. And then since then, it's been just settling down to a more modest growth rate. As you mentioned, our own, you know, our legacy Capital One business in the last quarter grew at, you know, I think 3.3%. Our overall card business grew less than that because we've had the brownout of the Discover business where Discover actually has been shrinking.
So if I think about, you know, where things go from here, you know, I think we're picking up a little steam in the legacy Capital One business. But also the shrinking continues on the Discover side. And we look forward to the turnaround of Discover, hopefully changing direction when Discover gets on our technology platform because we have always felt that they have an amazing franchise. But they've stayed very much in sort of a single lane with respect to customer targeting. Capital One has been much broader up and down the credit spectrum. And so we look forward to taking this amazing franchise of Discover and stretching both up and down the spectrum with their franchise and sort of leveraging our big marketing machine to hopefully reignite some growth there. So we look forward to that.
Just wanted to pivot. You know, the company has emphasized expanding international acceptance as a critical focus to optimize the Discover Network. You've mentioned that this is more of a boots-on-the-ground issue versus a tech issue. Maybe unpack that approach for us?
So let's just pull way back. You know, networks are amazing. It's an amazing thing to see a credit card or a debit card network. There aren't very many of them in the world. And the reason there aren't very many in the world is it's a very scale-driven business. And of course, it's a chicken-and-egg problem to ever get one started. And it's somewhat of a chicken-and-egg problem to get them growing. So we've been amazed at how Discover, with their modest volume, was able to build essentially like nearly universal acceptance in the United States. And then strikingly, solid acceptance internationally. But that international acceptance is still well short of what, you know, we would like it to be for, you know, heavy international travelers.
So what we've said from the time we announced the deal and we're still very much going down this path, that when we think about the opportunity to, you know, to move Capital One business onto the Discover Network, any quest we have runs through two things: building greater acceptance internationally and secondly, investing more in the network brand. So those are two of the things in our list of things that we're "leaning in" even more to invest in. We are doing those two things. In the meantime, we have moved our full debit card portfolio. We just finished moving that onto the Discover Network. And as we announced a couple of years ago, we will be moving some of our credit cards over onto the Discover Network after the integration enables that to happen.
Then we will continue to invest in the network to, you know, hopefully be able to move, you know, more business over time. The way to build international acceptance is really a boots-on-the-ground exercise. Discover has done that just really for years with a ground game that includes the following things: partnering with merchant acquirers who have many, many relationships with ultimately end merchants; also partnering with big merchants themselves; then there is the opportunity to partner with local networks; and finally, the opportunity to partner with local issuers where an issuer in another country would issue a Discover card. All of those are ground games. They just take time. They take investment. But the good thing is Discover has already demonstrated how to do it. We're just going to need to lean in and do more of it.
Speaking of investment, you know, you referred to some of this opportunity that you see in front of you and how that could create near-term pressure on the efficiency ratio. Maybe first off, can you define what the baseline is for the efficiency ratio given all of the moving pieces?
So if you think about the efficiency ratio, sort of generally where it has been since we closed on the Discover deal, we expect the efficiency ratio will be pressured by our continuing investments. In the near term, it would be pressured. We've also said to our earlier commentary that we expect coming out of the other side of the Discover integration, the earnings power would be pretty consistent with what we believed at the time of the announcement. But, you know, the message we have, though, is that we just see a lot of investment opportunities.
Many of them are enabled by years of investing in our technology transformation. And as we move up the tech stack, those opportunities are accelerating. But they require investment. Then also, some of our additional investment opportunities are coming from Discover itself and also now from Brex.
So let's pivot to the synergy opportunities from the Discover deal. Can you give us an update on the $2.5 billion combined revenue and expense synergies?
I'll take that one, Erica. The integration is going exceptionally well. We're very much on track to achieve the $2.5 billion by the second quarter of 2027. The two-year integration window that we had said at the time of the announcement, if I unpack that into the two big drivers, one being the revenue synergies, as Rich mentioned a couple of minutes ago, that it's predominantly driven by the debit conversion. We've essentially completed the debit conversion shipping of cards. It takes a little bit of time for the spend to fully ramp up. A very meaningful portion of the revenue synergies were actually in the fourth quarter results. We expect it to be the debit portion of it 100% by the second quarter of this year. On the expense side, that is going to be much more backloaded.
We need to merge people and processes and technology and decommission applications. And so we expect that to be much closer to the back end of the two-year integration window. But overall, again, very much on track. And, you know, we feel just as excited today, maybe even more so, about the strategic and financial benefits of the deal. And achieving the synergies are a really important part of that.
So I think what was potentially a little bit lost on the call because of the Brex announcement was your statement that you plan to originate Capital One cards on the Discover network and migrate existing cards early next year. You mentioned the integration. What kind of cards do you plan to migrate? And what kind of spending volume does that typically represent of your combined total?
So we announced at the time of the deal that we plan to move a total of $175 billion of spend between debit and credit as sort of the initial wave of migration. The debit card move has already happened. Let me give you a little window into how we're thinking about credit cards. We've already said that we have work to do on the international acceptance. And we have work to do with respect to the network brand. So what we're doing is very much kind of sloping the work, if you will, and targeting the customers that really don't have international travel and looking also where the economics are more favorable from moving from where we are onto the Discover Network, those economics, including on the Discover side, the vertical integration benefit of capturing the network margin.
So we kind of, you know, we take our portfolio and look at where we think there would be the least friction and sort of best economics with respect to moving. And that's what we targeted at the beginning. And then in the meantime, we'll do a bunch of things. We're going to keep investing in the network, keep investing in the network brand, and then also doing a lot of testing of different taking different parts of our portfolio and, you know, different choices, testing different ways to put them on the network and the offers and various things, all of that informing our strategic opportunity down the road to see where and how much we can move our volume onto the network down the road.
Thank you for that. You mentioned the completion of the debit conversion. Of course, you're one of one in terms of being both an issuer and a network on the debit side. I think that presents a pretty unique set of opportunities as someone that covers big banks. What kind of deposit offering do you think Capital One can offer on the back of this that could be a standout product?
So Erica, I think to answer your question, what I'd like to do is just pull way up and talk about our journey on the retail banking side because it has been very different from most banks. So first of all, we were really a fintech. I think before the word was invented, we were kind of like the original fintech. And we went to great lengths to transform our company by buying banks to build an insured deposit balance sheet. And, you know, that was a defining moment for Capital One. And we were motivated to do that first and foremost by the need to get a balance sheet that we felt would be resilient at all times.
But a benefit of that that we were very excited about, though, was the chance to pursue a business opportunity that we had always held out as the other best one beside credit cards. In the founding days, we said the best opportunities are credit cards and then retail banking, which itself is going to be transformed by technology. So what we set out to do is not to build a retail bank just like the other banks down the street, but really a very different one, a digital-first bank, more what we called the bank of the future, which was digital-first but not only digital.
We, you know, we have built physical presence that includes not only the branches that we bought in our bank acquisitions but now sort of showroom/cafe/branches in pretty much all the major metropolitan areas in the U.S. And we have digitally built full-service banking. We're not talking about just attaching a debit card onto the side, you know, of a deposit. We're talking about taking all the services that we offer in a branch and digitizing every pretty much almost all of them and then also creating ways that people can have access to cash nationally through ATMs and through stores and so on.
This has been the full-service, digital-first retail bank of the future that we have been building. It was designed to be lower cost, which it is, than regular retail banking with a branch on every corner. What we've done is to take the cost savings that we get in this leaner economic model and pass it on to consumers in the form of a really pretty electrifying offer, no fees, no minimums, and no overdraft fees.
That is a value proposition that is not matched in the marketplace by the major banks. It has been a pretty lean way to make a living because obviously, we have taken out quite a bit of the revenue in the retail banking model now with the Discover acquisition that, you know, adds, you know, adds some octane to our business model. But basically, we really already have what we think is the value proposition that we need, that no fees, no minimums, no overdraft fee model. And because we don't have branches everywhere, how we grow that business is with marketing. And we're leaning hard into the marketing. You can see us on national TV. And we're leaning in even harder now.
Thank you for that. You've talked about, and you just referred to this earlier, the growth brownout at Discover until fully integrated. What's the best guess in terms of the time frame between now and full integration? And what are your plans for the Discover brand?
So the Discover brownout, let's talk a little bit more about this thing that I call the Discover brownout. Discover ran into some credit challenges, which were a contributing factor to their choice to sell to Capital One. And they dialed back very significantly. And that was great from a credit loss point of view. It led to some continuing sort of weakness on the growth side. Capital One has also dialed back a little bit more, trimming around the edges with some of their higher balance revolver business, which we have philosophically tried to stay away from in our own legacy Capital One.
So both of those have contributed to basically a negative growth rate of the Discover portfolio. We are looking forward to turning around that growth. And the timing of that doesn't come at a single moment. Basically, there are different aspects of the integration. When they are complete, we're going to be able to lean in. But as a general matter, think of it as closer to the end of the integration that you'll see the sort of full benefits of our leaning back into Discover growth.
Maybe switching topics to capital return, you stressed during the earnings call that the Brex acquisition does not divert from your capital return plans. You bought back $2.5 billion in the fourth quarter. Is that the right quarterly cadence for investors to, you know, ballpark for 2026?
Well, I think it'll be helpful to just provide a little bit of historical context, Erica, in answering that question. If you go back to when we announced the Discover deal in February of 2024, after that, Capital One slowed our repurchases to a de minimis amount. Discover completely shut off their repurchases. So we were accreting capital to when we got to close in May of last year. Then after that, we needed a period to do the bottoms-up analysis to assess what our combined company long-term capital need is, which in the third quarter, we announced is 11%.
And in conjunction with that, also announced a new $16 billion repurchase authorization. So in that window, we continued to accrete capital and found ourselves at very healthy levels. In the fourth quarter, we upped our dividend by 33% to $0.80. We, as you mentioned, increased our repurchase to $2.5 billion. We ended the fourth quarter at 14.3% CET1, clearly very healthy capital levels. Our approach to repurchases is to look at a number of variables: the growth opportunities, the macroeconomic environment, the regulatory environment, AOCI. We have a lot of flexibility under SCB to increase and decrease the repurchase pace based on what we see in the environment around us at any point. We're going to take advantage of that flexibility going forward.
It's frozen until 2027.
It is not frozen until October of 2027 now, yes, or at least the level of their SCB. Our 11%, though, we view as our long-term capital need based on our evaluation. But the Fed's SCB level of us won't be enforced in the 2026 CCAR.
Yeah. So finally, Rich, you know, as we wrap up, you know, there's so much going on at your company. It's very unique. If you could just sort of distill it to one or two takeaways that you really want long-term investors to take away, particularly given the very unique opportunity set from both the Discover and Brex acquisitions.
Thank you, Erica. If we pull way up, let's just think about this journey. So since our, you know, you think about all the other major banks have been around for, you know, 100 or a couple hundred years. And so Capital One really, you know, was just created in the last few decades. And really, as we said, is really an original fintech. But because we were building a bank from scratch, we got a chance to do things differently than banks that have been around for 100 years. And it started with saying, let's really carefully choose what businesses we're in because we don't think all aspects of banking are attractive. And there are some parts of banking that are really attractive.
But let's always really look at the marketplace, look at the structure of markets and of industries. And then let's choose where to play. And then let's go all in. So we chose to go after, you know, it started with the credit card business. And we've obviously built a big card business, built an auto business. We built a retail banking business. But if you sort of stand back and say, why did we make the choices that we did? There are a couple of different ways that I would describe these choices.
First of all, in terms of industry structure, credit cards and retail banking just have amazing structure. And it's also right at the heart of consumer financial lives. So as we build a franchise there, then on top of that, we can build very attractive vectors of growth in things like shopping, like travel, like, you know, buying a car, and very much opportunities to bring great solutions to businesses. So we've come a long way in building that portfolio.
Discover and Brex really enhanced that. But let me describe our journey a little differently, same journey, but described differently. We believe since the founding days that payments were going to be the tip of the spear in the transformation of banking and financial services. So we have always worked backwards from building a payments company. Again, it started with credit cards. Then you've got the payment side on the banking side. But then we were able to get the Discover Network, which is an amazing piece in a payment franchise.
Along comes the Brex opportunity, which on the small business and really businesses of all sides is its own little tip of a spear in transforming how payments work on the business side. But if you pull up, we've ended up building a vertically integrated payments company with a very unique set of assets. But in every case, we have a business model that's, you know, at the forefront of how banking is changing. And we're leaning into that. And the other big thing I would use to describe Capital One is while the founding battle cry of Capital One was build an information-based technology company that does banking, competing against banks who use technology and information, but it's not who they are, that was the founding battle cry way back several decades ago.
When 2013 came, we pulled up and said, while the world views us as an information-based technology company, the truth is our tech is now old school. It was new school. But now it's old school. And we're going to transform from the bottom of the tech stack up this company that we have built. And we have done that. That was in 2013.
We're now in 2026, way down the path, but still not done with this extraordinary journey. But if I pull way up about what excites me about Capital One is we've chosen the businesses where we think the winning is. We've built a business to be the tip of the spear of how the world is changing and a tech stack to be able to power the next chapters in this unlikely story.
Well, Rich, I think that's a perfect way to wrap up this conversation.
Thank you.
Rich and Andrew, thank you so much for joining us this afternoon.
Thanks so much, Erica.
Thank you.