All right. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today, both in person and online. My name is Chris Kennedy. I'm the research analyst at William Blair that covers the fintech and payment space. For a complete list of research disclosures and/or potential conflicts of interest, please visit our website at williamblair.com. Next up, we have Corpay. From the company, we have the CFO, Tom Panther, and the head of IR, Jim Eglseder, in the room here. Corpay does several businesses, but at the core, they're focused on simplifying corporate payments. It has a great, great track record of growing, both organically and through acquisitions, which I'm sure we're gonna hear more about. And with that, let me pass it over to Tom.
Good. Chris, thanks. I'll get up, kind of walk around a little bit. If, in fact, you thought you were coming to the FLEETCOR presentation, you are in the right room. We did change our name back in March to Corpay. Many of you probably already know that now, ticker symbol CPAY. And we did that because it better aligns with what we represent and what we do as an organization. We, at our core, help companies with all sorts of expenses and how to pay expenses. Pretty much everything up and down the expense side of the ledger, except for payroll, we can help companies facilitate those payments.
Our value proposition is really around the spend management piece, and offering the ability to control spending, be able to see spending in a more consolidated fashion. Make it easier on employees of the employer in terms of expense reimbursement. Avoid the messy and cumbersome, tedious pay and reclaim process. Sure, there's an element of economics and value that comes with our products. The products we sell, generally, we can go to our customers and say: You engage with us, and we'll give you money back. We'll save you hard dollars, not just soft dollars of making things more efficient. We'll do that, too, but we can also save you money from a hard dollar perspective. And I was joking earlier today, even I, a 30-plus-year finance guy, can sell that product.
So we think the products are quite advantaged in terms of what we do. This is just a little bit of our baseball card in terms of just what the company looks like in terms of its size. We talk a lot about kind of the size and scale of the company. You can see that a $4 billion company for last year, $3.8-$4 billion this year, give or take, generates a significant amount of free cash flow. That is one of the real advantages. We'll get to that in a slide here in just a minute, but that's one of the real advantages, structural advantages of the company.
Internationally based in terms of the, our, our footprint, but our dominant or predominant, markets are the U.S., the U.K., and Brazil, but we also have presence in, in Europe and in, Australia. One of our deepest and widest moats that, you should take away from the conversation today is our networks. The networks that we have, our proprietary networks, are the things that allow us to draw our customers into the company to be able to interact with proprietary networks that give them the advantages that I talked about previously. And we'll talk about what those networks look like across each of the segments here.
And so the segments, as we've defined the company, we changed these back in the fourth quarter, just as an effort to further simplify the narrative around the company in terms of what we do. But we facilitate payments in related to vehicles, corporate payments, and lodging, and I'll talk about what each of those represent. But all of it is about trying to streamline and facilitate the payment of a company's expenses. So first, let's start with corporate payments. It's going on 30% of the company. It's divided up between, I'd say, two verticals, one where it's payables, where we're paying the expenses of a company, their AP, if you will, or cross-border, where we're facilitating the payment of cross-border FX transactions.
You'll notice that the verticals here will be the same first three verticals in each of the segments, because while we're not a vertically concentrated organization, our products and our networks tend to cater to those first three verticals that you see here in terms of construction, transportation, and business services. And I'll point out why that's important here later in the presentation. But the corporate payment segment is growing over 20%, give or take. It's we are the number one issuer related to Mastercard, so the amount of volume that we pump across the corporate payment segment, as you can see on the slide, is almost $150 billion of spend across the organization.
And that merchant portfolio, back to my network point comment, I'll point this out as we go along, over 1 million vendors that we have in our merchant portfolio, where we can take your AP file and facilitate the payment of those expenditures across over 1 million merchants within our overall portfolio. This is a little bit of the payment journey that makes up corporate payments, where we, overall, we're looking to bring people from what I'd characterize as a non-modern solution. Think of it as check or cash to a more modern solution.
And we can do that across a product journey, whether it's their T&E, where we can do it through a business card, or whether it's through virtual card, where we can pay pieces and parts of their AP file, or whether it's through full AP automation, where we can take the entire AP file, fully pay the entire amount of AP through some combination of ACH or virtual card. And we can also then bring them software, where if they want to go to the full procure-to-pay workflow solution, we can offer that as well. And for companies that have foreign currency needs, where they're making payments to vendors that are in a foreign currency, not domestic to them, to their company, then we can also facilitate the FX.
So again, back to being able to facilitate all forms of spend sans payroll. So vehicle payments is a little over 50% of the organization. Again, same three verticals that I mentioned earlier in terms of construction, transportation, and business services. And back to networks, we have proprietary networks with fueling and charging stations across the U.S., Brazil, U.K., and Europe. And the combination of the customers that we have in the segment and the networks that we have in those segments allows us, you know, to continue to grow the segment and further bring value proposition to our customers. Some of the things that's been particularly in focus is how are you going to continue to grow that vehicle payments business?
We talked late last year around some things that we were doing related to the vehicle payments business to continue to demonstrate the level of growth within the business. One, from a product perspective, one of the advantages we have is kinda knitting together, if you will, the ability to both sell a fuel card as well as a corporate payment solution. This allows us to go to both new customers and our base who are of some size and scale, and not only sell them the benefits of a fuel card but also be able to sell them the benefits of a corporate payment solution, namely the ability to take their AP file and pay a portion of their AP file using virtual card.
So an immediate advantage to them and benefit to us by getting more of their spend, lead with fuel, but get more of their spend through the corporate payment solutions by bringing together those two things. Which again gets back a little bit to my comment earlier around the commonness of some of these verticals across corporate payments and fleet, because there's more overlap, more relatedness across their spending categories. EV is something that really had a lot of attention, I'd say, 24 months ago. Maybe to some degree, some of that attention has faded a little bit. We've, you know, created solutions, particularly in the U.K. and Europe, but U.K. in particular, where EV, commercial EV was a bit more of size.
It still was small relative to the overall size of the market, but still EV was getting some attraction within the marketplace of the UK. We now have solutions where we can support a fleet manager, whether he has employees that drive a ICE vehicle, whether they drive a EV, or whether or not they charge it at home. We have the ability to be able to support all forms of kind of fueling of that car or that vehicle. We're now agnostic as to whether or not the vehicle is a combustion engine or whether or not it's charging. Our network on the UK, whether it's fuel, is call it 98% coverage. Our network related to EV is call it over 80% coverage.
Recently added Tesla to our network of charging stations to be able to support. And then finally, consumer vehicle. This was a bit of an entry into, say, a new addressable market within U.K. and eventually U.S., but it's taking a play from the Brazil playbook, where we can bring together millions of customers and put them up against networks. Customers and networks, talk about it all the time in terms of those are the two things, the two flywheels that make the company go. And so in the U.K., on the consumer side, we bought a company called PayByPhone, a parking company, may have used them in large metropolitan areas. And with that came around 6 million consumers, 2 million of which are regular users in the U.K.
So we're using our access to those 2 million customers who interact regularly with the app, to be able to now integrate our proprietary network solutions in the UK, whether that's fueling, whether that's charging, whether that's insurance, or whether that's, service and repair maintenance, think oil change, tire change. These are all networks that we already had, that we're now able to bring those networks into the app, so that rather than just using the app as a single-point solution to pay for parking, they can use the app to also find a fueling station, a charging station, pay for what we call contents insurance, which covers your contents while parked, or be able to find a proprietary garage that allows them to get their car worked on.
All of these things come with the convenience of being able to do this over an app, find it over an app, book it over an app, pay for it over the app, and get the rates that come with our proprietary networks. Why do we get better rates? Because we have all these customers. I can go to a service and repair garage and say, "Hey, if I can bring you 2 million customers, would you be willing to give me a tire change for a lower rate, associated with my customers?" Absolutely. Why wouldn't I want to do that? And so that's the power of the customers and the networks of bringing those together. Software to us is just the piece that sits in the middle.
The proprietary element, the moat, if you will, that I think defines our organization, are the millions of customers we have and the ubiquitous networks that come along with it, that companies just can't replicate overnight and without spending a significant amount of capital. This is just a little bit of that picture of bringing everything together all in one place, and particularly more and more using the app as the way of engaging with the consumer. And Brazil is a tangible proof point of us being able to accomplish this. You can see that we have multiple solutions. Interesting, Brazil started as a toll tag as the lead product. I mentioned earlier in the UK, the anchor product is parking.
So the anchor product may vary based on the market and our point of entry into the consumer space. But in Brazil, it started as a toll tag. We purchased the Brazil in 2016, and over time, we've turned that into much more than just a toll tag business. When I say toll tag, it's basically just an RFID barcode that you adhere to your windshield. Back in the day, it used to be a big, clunky pass that you'd put up on your or toll pass that you put up on your windshield. Now it's just a little barcode that you can stick to your windshield.
But not only does that allow you to drive through the toll without having to stop to pay, but we've built out the expanded network where that toll tag now works when you go to parking garages, McDonald's, fuel stations. Actually, went down there about a year ago. I started with the company a little bit over a year ago, and I said, "All right, I got to go. I'm an experiential learner. I want to figure out how this works. Let's go on a ride." And so we went through a couple of tolls. We went to a shopping mall. You drive up the arm of the to get into the shopping mall. Parking goes right up, you drive right in. We went to McDonald's.
You at least had to roll down your window to pick up the cup of coffee that we bought. But everything is read on the RFID code. It's a convenience that we offer the customers. We get paid partly through the subscription of the monthly subscription associated with using the toll tag, and then we get paid merchant discount revenue. We get paid fees from the merchants by bringing customers to them. It was fascinating in terms of how the leadership team down there has taken a simple point solution and turned it into a multifaceted solution.
That's the same idea that we have within the UK, where you start with 2 million customers, and rather than them just buying parking, they also are buying other products, for you or from you. Quickly on to lodging. It's about 15% of the business. It's comprised of what I call 3 verticals. Workforce, think blue-collar workers out in the field doing things overnight, tree cutting, laying fiber optic cable, asphalt, things of that nature. Airline, think pilots, flight attendants, hopefully none of us, as we return from home, but distressed passengers whose flights take a mechanical or weather delay, and you got to go overnight, stay somewhere. We support the booking of distressed passengers as well as regular crew of airlines.
And then finally, insurance, where people who have been displaced from their home because of some type of natural disaster or pipe breaking or whatever the case may be. So again, customers and networks, where we have over 40,000 hotels in the U.S., that we can then take our customers, whether they're in any one of those three verticals, and put them into hotels that we have a proprietary relationship with. Now, not all 40,000 hotels, would I say, are proprietary. Some of those are fill-ins. If somebody's going to a market within the U.S. that we don't have a proprietary relationship with, we have fill-in opportunities. But nonetheless, we can offer a fairly ubiquitous experience where workers or policyholders of insurance policies, homeowners, can then go stay in a hotel. And again, same value proposition.
We do almost 40 million hotel rooms a year. So we can go to hotels and say, "Do you want access to close to 40 million rooms over the course of a year?" "Yeah." "Okay, well, your normal rate is, you know, call it $100 a night. Why don't you give it to us? Let's contract, and you give it to us for $65 a night." "Sure, I'll do that, 'cause I know I'm gonna get some flow from you." We can then charge our customers less than that published rate of $100 a night. We can charge them a rate that both they get a discount off of the published rate, and we make spread between what we're paying the hotel versus what we're charging our customers. But it's not just a discount proposition, it's control.
It's allowing employees to book things, or even their travel administrator to book things in a very controlled manner. A lot of what we offer here is around control. We control what hotels people stay in. We control sometimes even what they watch on their TV, in terms of the level of control that an employer can have over managing these employees while they're out in the field. Not to mention centralized reporting, centralized payment. They're not keeping up, again, with receipts and having to go through the whole reimbursement process. They're very much trying to facilitate not only the travel admin's experience of managing people who are out in the field on a regular basis, but also having the technology to be able to support them in a way that facilitates the overall employee experience.
So the relatedness of these businesses is also something that is advantaged to us. Because as I mentioned earlier, the three leading verticals on all of those slides that teed up the segment referenced the three same verticals of transportation, business services, and construction. Why? Because a company can use our products across all three. Just think of a simple construction company. They're out moving about, they're fueling cars, they're putting gasoline in vehicles. Our fuel card would be a solution. Many times, those people are traveling somewhere. Our lodging products can be a solution. And of course, our AP solutions, these companies spend lots of money, particularly a company like a construction company that's buying materials.
And when you have a merchant portfolio that is able to cover a significant amount of their spend, then you have the opportunity to say, "Listen, we can be all, all three things to you. We can help you with simple T&E, we can help you with fuel, we can help you with lodging, and we can help you with your full AP." So more and more, as we've built out the company, and rounded out these verticals, as well as the merchant portfolios, we're able to go to companies and offer all three solutions to them. Now, admittedly, it's not always the same person inside the company. There may be somebody who's managing fleet versus somebody who's managing treasury and AP type things.
But as long as we can get an introduction, then our batting average is quite high in terms of our, our opportunity to close. And our target market tends to be larger SMB, middle-market enterprise. We tend to focus on companies of some level of size and scale. The smaller companies are ones that, you know, we will look at and service, but our sweet spot, our go-to-market is in that upper SMB, call it sometimes the seam and middle-market companies. That's where they're buyers of scale, of some level of heft of all three of these products. So let's get into a little bit of the X and the O's. I think I've got about eight minutes left. Talk about a little bit of the numbers. Got an analytical group in front of me.
Our algorithm, and you'll see the slide here in a second, of what we've been able to generate. We call it kinda 10% revenue growth, 13% EBITDA growth, and call it mid- to high teens earnings growth. Obviously, in any given year, based on capital allocation and what we do, the earnings number can have a bit of a range. One of the structural advantages of this company, though, is the level of free cash flow that it generates is significant. We only spend around $150 million a year in CapEx, and predominantly, that's technology-related things that we're using for product advancement.
So I wake up as the CFO on January one, knowing that I've got $1.004 billion of free cash flow that's gonna land in my lap on a relatively even basis over the four quarters of the year. Not to mention, we've got a solid balance sheet with lots of liquidity and access to capital. So the financial algorithm of this company is extremely strong. In fact, we actually did a recent analysis of the S&P 500 companies. If I had been more tech-savvy, I would have done a, like, poll the crowd and not put the bottom bar on there first and polled people. But if you look at the S&P 500, there are 17 companies that have a 10, 13, 19 forward earnings expectation.
We've been able to do it year after year, where we've generated revenue growth and earnings growth that exceed those levels. Now, I'll be the first one to say, the past doesn't necessarily indicate the future, but it's a pretty strong indicator that we've got a model that starts with sales, that allows us to know that we can generate the level of revenue growth and earnings growth that I just referenced. Show me a healthy company, and I'll show you a strong sales organization. One of the things I've been most impressed with, having been here now for a little bit over a year, is the sales culture and the sales rhythm. When I say sales culture, this isn't a bunch of, you know, cheering and kind of the fluffy stuff of sales. That's not our culture.
Our culture is very analytical, mathematically oriented, inputs that drive outputs. And that's why we've been able to generate the kind of sales growth over the years that that we have, is because we know what works. We know how much sales and marketing dollars we need to pour into the company, and then what comes out at the bottom of the funnel in order to be able to generate the sales. And being good operators of the company with a lot of fixed costs, it's a fairly predictable model when you get below revenue in terms of the variable expenses are going to be, the scalability of the business from a fixed perspective.
We generate EBITDAs that you can see starting in 2020, the COVID year, $300 million, $200 million, rough numbers here, $200 million, and another $200 million guide for 2024. So significant EBITDA growth by getting the revenue, having a relatively fixed cost expense base, being extremely, I would characterize, proficient operators of the company around expenses, it drives the kind of operating leverage and EBITDA margin expansion that you see here on the chart. And as I said, the free cash flow generation of the company is a significant advantage, 'cause then that allows us to deploy our free cash flow generally for one of two things. We either buy CPAY ourselves, or we buy other companies, or really both. And you look over our history, that's what we've done.
We take the free cash flow that we have, plus the capacity off of our debt instruments, to be able to both buy other companies that create recurring revenues and synergies. We have a track record of buying companies and doubling their profits in, call it two years, or we buy back some portion of our stock each year. So kind of on a bit more recent... kind of that's a little bit of the background of the company. I wanted to at least, because many of you would know that, I wanted to at least kind of talk a little about, well, what are some of the more kind of current things going on within the, within Corpay?
One, we are focusing on two businesses that we acknowledge, you know, had hit a little bit of a skid. The U.S. fleet business is something that we've been looking to rehabilitate. It should be a mid-single-digit grower. It hasn't been because of our pivot down to kind of a micro client. We got a bit away from our knitting, if you will, coming out of COVID, and we're heavily digitally oriented. There weren't as many people out in the field. There weren't as many people in offices, and so we went heavily digital, and that created a little bit of a hiccup, if you will, with that ratable sales model that I described. And then more recently, lodging. We've seen some softness in the lodging base. So those are some things that we're really working on.
We expect to see an acceleration in the second half of the year, and you can see some of the proof points, you know, ways in which we'll see the lift in the second half of the year, particularly coming out of those businesses. We have been buying more shares back. Last year, we took a little bit of a pause. That was just kind of a function of kind of a wait and see. You saw on the prior slide, how we bought a lot of shares back over the last 7 or 8 years, and we took a little bit of pause, so this year we're back into the buyback mode. And then we're also, you know, continuing to buy companies.
We bought a company down in Brazil that further built out the expanded network down there, and we've recently announced the acquisition of Paymerang, which we anticipate closing at the end of the month, as a way of further building out the corporate payments business. And so for 2024, a little bit off of our algorithm of 10, but 8% organic revenue growth. If you normalize for the sale of our Russia business, still mid-teens, mid- to high-teens earnings growth, and generating the free cash flow of just that, $1.4 billion and the margin expansion. So while dealing with a few little, as we say, problem children, still a result that is quite compelling.
If you just kind of think about the overall investment thesis, if I had to, you know, sum it all up, is again a company that helps other companies in a B2B fashion with managing their expenses. There's no company on the planet that doesn't have expenses, and so we feel like we've got products that allow us to support those companies in a wide array, and markets that are quite large and relatively underpenetrated with advantage products. So it's a great setup for a value proposition that's compelling. We give you you buy our products, we give you money back. Okay, wait a second. Can you repeat that for me again? You buy my products, and you pay me.
Yeah, that's the way this model works. And so we think it's something that has, you know, significant advantages against a large addressable market. And the results kind of speak for themselves in terms of the what that delivers. At the end of the day, we want to be able to, you know, continue to be a 10% grower, and are putting the pieces of the puzzle together, adapting to market conditions, as all companies have to do, but adapting to market conditions and putting the pieces together that allow us to continue to be a 10% top-line grower, and then continuing to be some, you know, great operators of the company, the earnings will just fall into place from there.
So hopefully that's a helpful overview of Corpay, and certainly appreciate the interest that you guys have in the company. I think there is a breakout session to follow, or is it in here, Chris? Okay, I'll let you give kind of logistics there, where you guys can come and grill me on any questions that you have.
All right. Well, why don't we thank Tom for coming. Appreciate it. There is a breakout upstairs.