Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Intuit's Annual Investor Day. My name is Kim Watkins. I am Director of Investor Relations here at Intuit. We really appreciate you taking the time to join us here today. We have a great day planned for you. We will have our senior leaders take us through our strategy and our top priorities. Brad will kick that off in a minute. About midway through, we will take a break, give you a chance to head out to the gallery walk, take a look at some demos, and maybe grab a refreshment, followed by our last two speakers. We will have ample time for Q&A with Brad. For those of you here with us in Mountain View, we would love it if you would actually join us for lunch as well.
I also wanted to mention that in addition to the speakers, we have Brad and Michelle's staffs here with us today, sitting alongside the edges of the room, including our founder, Scott Cook. We also have two people I wanted to introduce to you, our incoming CTO, Marianna Tessel, is right over there. Our incoming General Manager of our Small Business and Self-Employed Group, Alex Chriss, right there. Please make sure you introduce yourselves to them at the break. Couple other housekeeping items. We have Wi-Fi on the Intuit guest network. There is no access code required. To reach the restrooms, they are a little bit of a hike out the back door to your left, around through the demo area, and curve over to the right. Okay, forward-looking statements. These presentation materials include forward-looking statements.
There are a number of factors that could cause our results to differ materially from our expectations. Please see the section entitled "Cautions about forward-looking statements" in the enclosed appendix for information regarding forward-looking statements and related risks and uncertainties. You can also learn more about these risks in our Form 10-K for fiscal 2018 and our other SEC filings, which are available on the Investor Relations page of Intuit's website at www.intuit.com. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statement. These presentations include certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please see the section entitled "About non-GAAP financial measures" in the enclosed appendix for an explanation of management's use of these financial measures and a reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures. In this presentation, we may also announce plans or intentions regarding functionality that is not yet delivered.
These statements do not represent an obligation to deliver this functionality to customers. Okay, with that, this is our gallery walk lineup for today. We are showcasing eight innovations, including two experiments. Every station is staffed by senior leaders and product managers, and they are organized along the three pillars of our One Intuit ecosystem strategy, delivering personalized experience through a trusted open platform that creates indispensable connections. These are really great demos that I am sure you will want to see and range from everything, including our TurboTax Live offering and other innovations that leverage really innovative technologies such as AI, machine learning, and chatbots. Definitely spend some time in the gallery walk today. With that, let's get started. It is my pleasure to introduce Brad Smith.
Thank you, Kim. Here, now give me a hug. We're a hugging group here. Good morning, everyone, and let me add my welcome to Intuit's 2018 Investor Day. As Kim just shared, we have an exciting agenda in store for you today, and I hope you're going to find what we have to discuss incredibly useful. As I reflect back, fiscal year 2018 was a very strong year for Intuit. In fact, it was one of our better performances in recent history. What's most encouraging for us is just 12 months into our new One Intuit ecosystem strategy, we have built real momentum. Our goal today is to put that momentum and our fiscal year 2018 results into the context of a multi-year change journey. We'll talk about areas where we've developed meaningful progress and areas where we know we have an opportunity to improve our game.
We'll talk to you about what we see as opportunity out on the horizon and our game plan to capitalize on that opportunity and accelerate our performance. To kick off the day, I want to start by first looking back. We often remind ourselves at Intuit, those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it. You may recall a couple of years ago, I shared with you an article I came across as I was flying across the country in Fortune magazine written by Geoff Colvin entitled "How the Best Business Leaders Disrupt Themselves." It was the first sentence of the article that caught my attention. Why isn't Intuit dead? Of course, at that point, I felt there was career implications on the line, and I thought I'd better read the article.
As I got underneath it, he went on to describe it's because Intuit continually disrupts itself. Something only a handful of incumbents, like Amazon, Netflix, and Intuit, have done. He began to study these companies and shared that there were three patterns he observed. First, we actually view our businesses the way a disruptor would see us. Second, we have the courage to drive change even when the companies are performing well. Third, we do this time and time again. Jeff was intrigued enough that we invited him to attend our State of the Company kickoff last fall. In that State of the Company kickoff, we were going through our customer-driven innovation and Design for Delight training. Those are the two capabilities we teach all of our employees.
We did a full day of that with Scott Cook engaged, teaching all of our employees, how do you do Follow Me Home, and how do you truly innovate like a startup? Geoff was so intrigued that he came back and he wrote a follow-up article this past year. He answered the question at a deeper level. The reason why Intuit continually thrives is because it treats all employees like owners, trains them like entrepreneurs, and they wake up every day and view it as day one, and that transforms Intuit into a 35-year-old startup. Or as Geoff said a little more eloquently, makes us the Tom Brady of our industry, playing at an age at the peak of our game when many of our other peers had stopped playing. That was pretty high compliment and quite humbling.
The truth is, that's not unique to this generation of Intuit employees. For 35 years, through four chapters, through multiple technology shifts and competitive threats, every individual who had the privilege of wearing an Intuit badge got out of bed every morning, fell in love with the customer problem, not our solution, went deep to understand that problem and applied elegant design and the most contemporary technology of the day, going all the way back to DOS. Last but not least, measuring success in the only way that matters, through the eyes of the customer. At Intuit, we call this customer-obsessed, design-inspired, technology-powered. Our most recent series of reinventions began at the early part of this decade. You know this well. We had emerged from the recession stronger than many because the truth be known, our products are needed most when times are tough.
They help families manage their checkbooks. They help small businesses get more customers and make more money. As we came through that recession, we had momentum, but as we looked out over the horizon, we saw four major trends that were starting to affect our businesses and our customers. We said, "Let's lean into these." Let's embrace this notion of our small businesses now doing global business. We see them adopting the cloud and mobile devices. Now big data has been democratized for the everyday man and woman. We began a big change effort that internally we called Project BOLD. Project BOLD was designed to transform Intuit from this North American desktop software company to this global, cloud-driven product and platform company. I will tell you, Project BOLD required intestinal fortitude. We had to reshape our portfolio.
We divested businesses that we loved, including the original product that started this company, Quicken. We leaned into the cloud. For the next five years, Project BOLD put new wind in our sails and repositioned Intuit for a new chapter of growth. We built on this strong entrepreneurial culture that had started when Scott began the company. We began to develop a brand where the world's top talent, the top data scientists, the top mobile engineers, could come in here and do amazing work. They applied their talents with our innovation techniques and began to solve customer problems using the newer, more contemporary methods like big data and mobile and the cloud. During this period of time, we doubled our customer base, and 80% of those customers were moving in on newer devices like subscription services.
As a result of that, we accelerated our revenue growth over this period of time, doubling the revenue in this period of time. As you know, shifting the mix of our sources of revenue from what had been about 60% licensed sales to all of a sudden became roughly 75% subscription and recurring revenue models. That produced not only accelerating growth, but a more predictable recurring revenue stream that drove investment options up. For those who bet on the company, they got good returns relative to some of the options in the market. We were very pleased with this five-year period. As we entered 2017, we looked out over the horizon. We saw significant shifts in the market that we thought could be catalysts for growth if we capitalized on them, or quite honestly, sources of disruption if we failed to execute.
We took our top 150 leaders. We broke them down into three-person teams. We call these action learning teams. We assigned those teams one of these topics, and they fanned out around the globe. For nine months, they went deep in observing customers directly. We interviewed, shadowed, and benchmarked 225 companies we admire, Amazon, Facebook, all the companies that we think are doing amazing things. Then we ran 100 experiments on five continents. The end result where the insights were amazing, but the implications on our company's game plan were profound. In fact, while Project BOLD still had plenty of gas in the tank, last year, we stepped back and said, "It's time for a fundamental rethink.
It's time to repair the roof once again while the sun is shining." We rewrote the company's mission and embraced a new strategy, the One Intuit ecosystem, designed to unlock the power of many for the prosperity of each and every participant on our platform. This was designed to move the company from just completing successful product transactions to now facilitating interactions between products, interactions between people, and ultimately creating what we call these indispensable connections. Now, we're 12 months into this strategy. We walked you through the strategy last year. What I want to do today is walk you through some of the early momentum that's already resulted from 12 months of execution.
To do that, I'm going to share with you about a half a dozen examples of where we're creating greater value for an end user, greater value for their counterparty, and unlocking new opportunities for Intuit. I'll start first with the small businesses and their accountants. Small businesses, we know, employ 60% of the world's workforce. The odds are stacked against the small business. One out of two fail in the first five years. They're always sure it'll be the other person, because small businesses, by definition, are risk-takers. There is one way to increase their odds of success, to work with an accountant. It increases their odds of success 89%. On the other side, accountants would love to grow their practice, to serve more clients, to help them be successful.
Many times, those clients come in with shoe boxes and spreadsheets and travel logs, and the accountants have to clean that up and type it into software. They're so busy doing that mundane work, they get an average of four new clients a year. Our team said, "Why don't we turn QuickBooks Online into a matchmaking platform? Let's match our millions of small businesses with our hundreds of thousands of accountants and see if we can make them both mutually successful." Last year, this last 12 months, 58% of our customers now work with an accountant. That's up 500 basis points from one year ago. Accountants got three times as many leads from us in the last 12 months as they had in the previous years. When they worked together, they were more successful, and that increased the retention rate of QBO significantly.
We call that a win-win-win. It's not just small businesses who need access to expertise. You know these results here. 60% of tax filers, families and individuals, still turn to an expert to help them get their taxes done. Tens of millions would be willing to do taxes on their own if they simply had an answer to that nagging question that erodes their confidence. "My daughter just graduated college, can I still deduct her? I just moved between states. What are the implications to my tax filing?" That often causes them to go to an expert. On the flip side, we have a lot of tax experts who say, "During tax season, I have peaks and valleys.
I'd love to take some questions and earn some supplemental income." Of course, you know now Version 1 of TurboTax Live was launched last year, the ability to get access to a tax expert at the touch of a screen. The first season and market increased the confidence of the tax filers 19 points, generated millions of dollars of supplemental income for the 2,000 pros on our platform. For Intuit, that unlocked a $20 billion total addressable market. It increased TurboTax Online retention 200 basis points, and it increased the mix of customers we got from assisted methods and, the surprise, first-time filers. It was a big win for us this season. Another example that I want to highlight is we're starting to connect products to products. Sometimes those are our own products.
In the case of the self-employed, we know it's about a third of the workforce today, estimated to be as high as 50% in the next several years. Throughout their day, they commingle their personal and their business expense. Come tax time, the government expects them to file a special form for small businesses called a Schedule C. There's a benefit for them if they actually separate those expenses because they can deduct many of those business expenses. That becomes really hard to do when you've got 365 days of commingling and you got to sort it out. We took two products, QuickBooks Self-Employed, TurboTax Self-Employed. We said, "Let's put these together as a bundle. Throughout the year, swipe left if it's business, swipe right if it's personal.
Come tax time, push the button, the taxes are done." We did that this year, saved $4,628 in tax deductions for the average Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, DoorDash contractor. That equates to an 8% annual income increase. QuickBooks benefited from this because it got over half its customers from the TurboTax channel. TurboTax benefited because being bundled with QuickBooks, it now has a multi-hundred million dollar product line that grew 18% this year. Again, everyone involved in this ecosystem benefited. We're also looking to create opportunities to get access to capital that small businesses and families need. One example is young businesses. They've been in business less than two years. They don't have the track record and the credit history to be able to get access to short-term loans.
We have lenders who would love to be able to lend their capital, but they want to make sure that that's at the appropriate risk. We've rolled out QuickBooks Capital. Because of our data and our algorithms, this year, we were able to get loans to 60% of people who were previously considered unlendable by the FIs. The loss rates on these loans are less than half of what the industry average is right now. For us, we have an incredibly popular product where many customers are coming in and wanting to take out a second loan. That is a great example of how we're using big data algorithms to be able to create wins for both the customer and the other partner. It's not just small businesses. We also have families. We know 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
They have less than $1,000 for an emergency situation. On the other side of the equation, you have FIs and other lenders that would love to help them get access to capital, but they want to make sure that these individuals are going to pay them back. This year, we took a big step forward. We took TurboTax and said, "Let's make it an open platform and create a year-round financial app called Turbo." By doing that, we had 25 million people between Mint and Turbo consent to use their data to help them get lower interest rates and access to loans.
On the other side, if you were a partner taking a lead from one of these products, because of the data we have and the algorithms we produce, they're pre-qualified leads that yielded a nine times lift in conversion versus other leads they're getting from partners in the market. For Intuit, we shared this data last year. This gives us an opportunity to offer a service like Turbo or Mint for free to the end user. The end user gets even deeper savings when they get better interest rates and access to loans, and the partner pays us. The kinds of revenue per return we can get from that partner can be as high as five times what we got from a TurboTax customer. The consumer gets more value, the partner gets higher conversion, and we get higher ARPU.
The last example that I will walk through is our opportunities now to begin to work with big mega institutions and blue-chip partners who serve tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of customers. We talked about these families who struggle to make it paycheck to paycheck. Many times, the biggest paycheck they get all year is their tax refund. Half of them didn't even know they were going to get a refund, and as soon as they have this newfound money, they begin to think about discretionary items like big screen TVs they're going to go buy. They forget they don't have that rainy day fund set aside for an emergency. You have mission-driven companies like Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase, who for years have been saying: How do we help these families make better financial planning decisions at the moment when they have the money?
We've been partnering with JPMorgan Chase, and this year we had $ billions of TurboTax refunds deposited into Chase savings accounts. By the way, by co-marketing with JPMorgan Chase, 45% of those customers were first-time customers to TurboTax. The families win, JPMorgan Chase wins, and we win. Those are just a half a dozen examples. The point here is we're 12 months into this journey, and already we demonstrated that we're able to create more value for our customers, greater upside for our partners, and more opportunities for growth for Intuit. Because of that momentum, the end result in fiscal year 2018 is it produced the strongest financial year we have had in more than a decade. I realize these numbers are now a little bit dated since we finished up in July 31st for their fiscal year.
To produce 15% revenue growth, 20% non-GAAP earnings per share growth, and to drive our QBO subscribers once again above the high end of the guidance range was an incredibly strong year. We are Intuit. When we get underneath these numbers and we hold up the mirror, we will tell you, we have areas where we performed well and areas where, quite frankly, we left opportunity on the table. I'm going to spend a minute just doing reflections of where I feel like we've really developed momentum and where we have an opportunity to take our game to the next level, then we'll shift to our go-forward plan. I'll start with our culture. We do strive to be a 35-year-old startup. Scott is deeply engaged each and every day as he was 35 years ago.
We train all of our employees on the entrepreneurial techniques of customer-driven innovation and Design for Delight, they're working magic. Sometimes barriers get in their way. Our people managers had lost our way. We were leaning into the craft along with our employees and not removing barriers that got in their way. This past spring, we brought back the lessons of Bill Campbell, we reminded all of our people managers, our job is to be a great coach and to remove the barriers that get in the way of entrepreneurs. That's our value add, we've been focused on that, I can already feel the momentum shifting in the last few weeks as I've been visiting all of our sites around the globe.
Our employees are proud to have an opportunity to contribute to solving important problems, whether in finance, legal, HR, they're all taught these experimentation techniques. This year, our products improved across the board. The benefit went up for our customers. Net Promoter Scores advanced higher versus competitors. On the other side, I will tell you, we have a long way to go to improve our first use experience. I'll give you two data points. Greg Johnson's going to share with you in a minute, we have 95 million people who visit turbotax.com every year. 30 million turn into TurboTax filers. 65 million drop out of that process. Sasan is going to talk about 46 million people visiting quickbooks.com that are unique to the website, and we have 3.4 million subscribers. That is a lot of produce spoiled on the floor.
We have an opportunity to do a better job of understanding why you're coming in and getting you to the benefits you seek immediately. I will also tell you, we are still in the early days of becoming an ecosystem. We grew up as an application and product company. We have a half a dozen examples that us walk through of where we're making that momentum. We're still early days of learning how to be a good partner with JPMorgan Chase, with Amazon, with Facebook, and Google, and others. How do we actually work together to create value that neither one of us could have done on our own? To do that, you have to have nimble technology, and I want to pay credit to Tayloe Stansbury, our Chief Technology Officer for the past decade, who's done an amazing job with the engineers that he works with.
They have refreshed our technology. They have leaned into the public cloud. They've advanced our artificial intelligence and machine learning. On the other side, he will tell you, we are seven feet over a 10-foot ditch. We are not all the way where we need to be. We've got more work to do. We've got to prioritize, and he'll talk about what we plan to do to close that remaining 30%. I've been here for a while, 16 years. I've never seen a year when every business in the company not only delivered greater benefit for their customer, expanded their categories, and took share, but beat their financial numbers. There was not an outage this year in the business. Every team member in this company contributed.
On the other side, as we look ahead, we will tell you, we still are proving to ourselves and to you that we have a repeatable global playbook. We do believe we have one now, but now we have to put points on the board and show you that we have that confidence. Turbo is just its first year. We are excited about the early results of Turbo, but we want to demonstrate TurboTax can become a 365-day-a-year app. Last but not least, I won't steal from Michelle. She's going to walk through the financials. I will say this. Everyone realizes that we're in the 10th year of a recovering economy, entering the 10th year of a bull market.
Growing up in West Virginia, my dad used to say, "If you predict rain often enough, eventually you'll be right." I will say this, we're already thinking ahead. Let's control our controllables. Let's make sure we have our resources invested in the right areas, and we're not letting our expenses get out of way, so if and when there is a market correction, we can play offense as we've done in the past. Fiscal year 2018 was a very strong year. It wasn't a perfect year. We've got plenty of opportunity to improve our execution and to increase our opportunity. You're going to hear these things come out from all the presenters in a minute. What I will tell you is we have a strong foundation upon which to build.
This year, we leaned into that foundation by once again, getting everyone in the company focused on the two techniques of customer-driven innovation and Design for Delight. We have reasons to believe that our One Intuit ecosystem strategy is working. For those who followed the company and were here last year, you've heard this story. I'm going to move through it at a quicker pace. As we say at Intuit, repetition doesn't ruin the prayer. We're going to go through it so everyone is once again reminded of what we're trying to do with the company. It begins with our mission. Every company needs a reason why. Today, millennials join companies that have an important why before they care about what you build.
Our why began 35 years ago at a small kitchen table that sits right out there in the hallway when Scott watched his wife struggle to balance the family checkbook. The spirit of our mission has never changed in 35 years. The words have. We've refreshed the words four times, last year, we did it once again to make them more aspirational and succinct. Our mission, as you now know, is powering prosperity around the world. To bring that mission to life, we try to create a 35-year-old startup with employees who hold themselves to a set of values that our mothers and fathers and our children would be proud of. Our values, like our mission, have been refreshed four times in 35 years. Most recently in 2014. These remain durable, we don't have any changes to report today.
We take that mission, we take these fired up employees who are trained to be entrepreneurs, we all focus them on a common set of success metrics. We call these True North. True North for us is grounded in two principles, stewardship and stakeholders. Stewardship is the responsibility we feel for not only delivering our commitments to you in the current fiscal year, but making the decisions today that will leave the company stronger for the generations who will follow us. Stakeholders are a balanced scorecard. We're clear about who we serve and what it is they want out of their engagement with Intuit. For each of these stakeholders, we have a set of metrics with one, two, and three-year goals. I fully recognize these are not populated for this public consumption.
That's because I want to caution myself and Michelle not to get into multi-year guidance. I will tell you that internally, we have a fully built-out version of this slide, what's on this page is not aspirational. It's a commitment. A commitment so sincere that this is how the board assesses me and all the managers in the company, this is how our compensation is based. With the mission and values and a clear understanding of what the scoreboard needs to read, if we're successful, you need a game plan to bring that all together. That's our strategy. Inside the company, I talk about a strategy being like a GPS. I describe to our employees, a GPS has three things. The first thing it asks you is, where are you going? What's your destination?
Our destination is we want to power prosperity around the world. We want to be the champion for the underdog, the over-served, the underlooked. We want to help the families do better than live paycheck to paycheck. We want to help small businesses succeed at a much higher rate than they do today. If we do that, we can unlock prosperity around the world. If that's our destination, the second thing a GPS asks you is, okay, where's your point of origin? Our point of origin is one customer at a time. Now, just as Jeff Bezos did at Amazon when he said there are three enduring benefits they seek to deliver, wider selection, faster delivery, lower prices, and that won't change for a millennia. Our products also have three very enduring benefits customers want. We're in the finance and compliance space.
They want more money with no work and complete confidence they're not going to get in trouble. That's what we have to deliver for every individual customer. If we know where we're going, we know where we're starting. The next thing the GPS does is it gives you a route. Our route is the One Intuit ecosystem, designed to unlock the power of everybody on this platform for the success and the prosperity of every individual who participates. Now, to bring that strategy to life, as I shared with you, we first look back over 35 years. We studied the generations before us, and we brought everything forward that has made Intuit durable through all the change we've lived through. Customer obsessed, design inspired, technology powered. We also got really clear what problems we solve.
There are many more problems our customers have, and there may be more problems over time we demonstrate we can solve well. Today, we know we can solve finance and compliance. As I've said to you before, we recognize these are not exciting categories. Customers don't wake up in the morning and say, "I cannot wait to do taxes. I'm so excited to pay bills. Wow, wait for that payroll to come." We know if they get these things wrong, there are huge consequences. There's penalties and interest and late fees and bankruptcies and dashed dreams. We focus where they don't want to focus so they can put their energy into the things they care about. Then we know who we focus on. Three core customers, small businesses, the self-employed, and the consumer.
In today's world of platforms and mobile devices, our average customer uses 18 to 20 apps to run their business or manage their financial life. We only make a handful. We need our partners sitting at the table with us contributing their products, their expertise, their data, and combining that with ours, we can match our design, our algorithms, our data scientists, and we can deliver those three things that Kim reminded you of earlier. Personalized experiences through a trusted open platform where everything works together, whether Intuit built it or not, then creating those indispensable connections I went through a couple of minutes ago. This is what the gallery walk will begin to give you a sense of what we're trying to do. That's the One Intuit Ecosystem strategy. 12 months old, designed to unlock the power of many for the prosperity of one.
To bring that to life, we break that down into six priorities. Three are designed to accelerate our velocity in doing what's right for customers. The other three are designed to make sure we're delivering those three core benefits that are enduring, more money, no work, and complete confidence. Every presenter who will be speaking with you today is going to be talking about these six priorities. They will talk about the metrics we use in all of our operating meetings inside the company to measure our success. To put a bow around it, we now have a refreshed One Intuit strategy that is 12 months in the making, that has demonstrated reasons to believe that we're creating greater value for customers and partners and unlocking new opportunity for Intuit, and it produced the strongest year we've had in a decade.
There's two other things the strategy is doing. It's creating deeper competitive moats. For 35 years, our company has benefited from these competitive advantages. The ability for us to have earned the trust of our customers, the government, the banks, the partners in protecting their most important data. We have learned that life's a team sport, and we work closely with accountants who are the most trusted advisor. We've learned how to take complicated things like the U.S. tax code and turn it into simple yes and no questions so everyone feels like they're capable of doing their own taxes. Those things are going to continue to be important. They just aren't going to be sufficient going forward. Our new strategy has created new sources of competitive advantage. We already had sticky categories. People don't get excited about learning another accounting package.
Now by having a platform where you can connect a second app from a third party, we increase the retention of QBO 10 points. Those partners and us and our customers are contributing data that our data scientists, with the algorithms they create, are able to produce magic for customers. Tayloe is going to talk about, we have 349 patents filed in the data science machine learning area. That's up from 150 a year ago. 70 different applications in production from 40 a year ago. The ultimate opportunity is to transform those indispensable connections into network effects, which we all know is the most durable source of advantage in the market. Our strategy is also creating deeper moats. Last but not least, is unlocking a total addressable market that is five times greater than it was just a handful of years ago.
This new strategy has put wind in our sails. Our core businesses, as I mentioned earlier, are growing at a faster pace than we've seen. QBO this year grew its subs 43%. International QBO grew 62%. Self-Employed grew 85% in subscribers. TurboTax was able to grow the category, take share, and grow its revenue 14% in a year when we had set 7%-9% guidance. Our core businesses have never been healthier. What really excites us is they're stronger together than they are apart. We started to create connections between these products, between the customers that use these products, and it unlocks all those examples that I went through earlier and many more, some of which you will see out there in the gallery walk.
Last but not least is we are firm believers, and we are excited in the new global playbook that Sasan will walk you through. We think we have a repeatable playbook and we boil it down to three simple things. Product market fit that's better than the local alternatives. Today, we have a five to ten point advantage versus those alternatives across the globe. The second is then lean in to go to market that allows us to expand our global footprint. We now have 24% of our customers outside the U.S. It was 21% this time last year. Then make sure we do that efficiently and effectively with an LTV to CAC greater than three. Right now, our blended LTV to CAC is 4.5.
I'm going to put a bow around it because I'm providing the overview, but the real magic comes from the leaders that make it happen every day. I'll summarize by saying we are a company that works very hard every day to learn from the best wheel makers. Sometimes those are the generations before us, sometimes those are the people in the market that we admire, and we look in the mirror and we say, "What are we going to preserve?" "What are we going to change?" Last year, we went through a fundamental rethink. Exciting new mission, a One Intuit ecosystem strategy. We're 12 months into that game. We've been able to create more benefit for customers, more benefit for partners, and unlock new opportunities for Intuit. We're just getting started.
I've never been more confident in where we sit today, and I've never had a higher degree of confidence in the management team that's going to present to you now. It's my pleasure with that overview to introduce to the stage Diego Rodriguez and Tayloe Stansbury to walk you through the first set of priorities. Thank you.
Hello there. I'm Diego Rodriguez. It's a pleasure to be here with you today at this forum. It's my first time joining you.
I'm Tayloe Stansbury. I'm CTO at the company, as you know, Marianna Tessel will be replacing me come the new year. We've actually worked together for many years, 17 years, across three different companies, I have super high confidence that she'll carry this to the next level.
Brad just walked us all through from our mission to our strategy. What Tayloe and I are going to be focusing on are the first of our three priorities, which come under the headline of accelerate velocity in doing what's right for customers. Those three priorities are awesome end-to-end experiences, speed as a habit, and technology to accelerate growth.
This is all coming together in our ecosystem, as Brad described, where we're building the technology and the user experiences to power prosperity around the world.
I'm going to start us off by talking about awesome end-to-end customer experiences, my favorite subject, I want to introduce you to our recipe for creating those experiences. The recipe consists of two major ingredients, customer-driven innovation and Design for Delight, or D4D. If you put these two together, what they give us is an understanding of what to solve, how to solve it, and how to win. Really, those end up being Intuit's secret sauce. Customer-driven innovation is about helping us figure out what to solve. It starts out with us looking for an important unsolved customer problem that we and those we enable can solve well, critically, one where we can build durable competitive advantage so we can win over the long haul.
These three circles overlap for a reason, because we feel that success lies at their convergence. It isn't enough just to find a great customer problem to solve. We really need to be doing it in a way that builds durable competitive advantage because we can do it better than anybody else. That's how we figure out what to solve. The next step is thinking about how are we going to solve it, and that is Design for Delight. Stepping back, the most important thing for you to know about Design for Delight is that everything at Intuit starts and ends with humans. It's all about us creating that benefit for someone out in the world so they can really live a better life. Accordingly, Design for Delight starts out with deep customer empathy. Empathy really is the wellspring of innovation.
The way we get empathy for our customers is by spending time with them, gleaning insights about what makes their lives tick, what their problems are, what their dreams and aspirations are. We move on to going broad to go narrow. Here's what we mean by this. We work really hard to fall in love with the problem and not with the solution. That's how the best innovations happen. We will go broad and think of thousands of possible ways to solve a problem, making sure that we're asking the right questions. Then we'll go narrow, focusing on some promising ones, and then go broad again. We'll repeat that cycle over and over and over in an iterative fashion. Then finally, we'll build prototypes, and we bring them to customers.
We run lots of experiments with our customers to really get their input into what works and what doesn't. We'll take the things we learn and roll those back into our prototypes, we'll iterate through that process until we arrive at that magic solution that truly delights our customers. Design for Delight is about deep empathy for our customers, going broad to go narrow, running rapid experiments with our customers. When we do those three, directed by working on the most important customer problem, we will end up delivering the right benefits to our customers, those benefits lead to delight. If we do it all right, delight leads to growth. That's kind of the theoretical approach. How do you actually do it in practice? How do you actually create deep firsthand empathy for your customers?
The secret is to get out of the office and go spend time with customers to really understand what they see, what they do, what they feel, what they think, and what they say. We want to understand all of those things at a first-hand level. Really, we've been doing this for the duration of the company. Follow Me Homes are how we do this, what a Follow Me Home is literally getting out of the office and following a customer at their place of business or at their home, wherever they're getting their life done. The key here is that we don't have a team of market researchers that goes out and do this only. We do have market researchers. We're not digesting a PowerPoint that they give us.
We demand, we insist, we love that our teams go out and actually spend time with customers firsthand. We do this in a multidisciplinary kind of way. You'll have a team go visit a customer like this, which is the Wright Gardener. They're a QuickBooks Online customer. I love that T-shirt. We'll have an engineer show up from Intuit and a designer and a data scientist, and maybe another team will come and visit them. That team could be populated by a customer success expert, a product manager. You get the picture. We're all getting out of the building to go spend quality time with our customers. It's really the best way to get empathy.
This is so important to the process we practice here, because that deep empathy that we get for an individual customer and that shared experience as a team is what allows us to translate that empathy into the deep insights which we can use to create superior delight for all of our customers. This is the core of our innovation process at Intuit. Brad mentioned this, we conducted this amazing customer obsession tour a year ago. This is really rooted in the kitchen table that Brad mentioned, which you can see in the building, and Scott, 35 years ago, watching his wife labor to balance their checkbook and him thinking, "There really has to be a better way to do this." Of course, he built it.
The customer obsession tour is really about us going back to the ideals of customer obsession set out by Scott. What happened in this tour? It's pretty remarkable. We had 8,300 Intuit employees across 16 Intuit sites, get out and conduct 3,800 Follow Me Homes. That is an amazing number of Follow Me Homes. Of course, we learned a ton, and it was about getting to some new customer insights. That's really not the only reason we did this. The reason is much deeper. By conducting this customer obsession tour, we really enabled every employee at Intuit to substantially raise their game when it came to CDI and D4D. In doing so, as an organization, we increased our already profound sense of customer obsession. It's a big success. You'll see it playing out in our products and how they're doing a year later.
I hope you can get the sense that what we've done is to take the individual ability of our founder, Scott Cook, and turn it into an organizational capability. This is so important to our culture and the way our organization functions, because having everyone have a deep command of CDI and D4D allows them to lead, because everybody at Intuit is a leader. It allows them to lead, not just through the values that Brad ran us through a little while ago, but through CDI and D4D. This really is the way that we work. We believe it's important for every employee at Intuit to be in command of these. Whether you're a new employee or one of our most experienced product developers, we give you training in CDI and D4D.
For example, on your first day at Intuit, we will take you through CDI and D4D as part of your onboarding as a new employee. For that world-class designer who's been designing stuff for decades, well, we're always coming up with new and better ways to ensure that they can continue on their own personal journey to mastery with CDI and D4D. This investment is really paying off. If you think about the thousands of Follow Me Homes we do a year, and the prototypes that you'll see hanging on the walls of all of our design studios around the world, and all of the experiments that we're constantly running with customers, and you combine that with this investment in training, it really is driving the benefits that our customers need from us.
This commitment to CDI and D4D is having a market effect on the results we're seeing in the market today when it comes to those benefits of more money, no work, and complete confidence. Let me just give you a few examples. We know that for a small business, cash flow is their lifeblood. It's really an existential thing. Being able to pay your vendors and your employees, it all depends on having great cash flow. QuickBooks customers who use the QuickBooks Payments system get paid three times faster than small businesses who don't. That's remarkable in terms of cash flow. If you think about no work, Brad told you about our QuickBooks Self-Employed product and how it makes it easy to swipe right and left in terms of personal or your taxes.
That's driven by auto-categorization technology, and those customers experienced a 4% increase in auto-categorization accuracy over the last year. That translates into more time for them to do the things they love to do. Finally, complete confidence. The way we measure the confidence of the people who file their tax returns with us is to ask the following, "Were you able to complete that tax return with no unanswered questions? Were you able to complete it without any unanswered questions?" For those people who completed it using TurboTax Live, we saw a remarkable 19-point increase in that measure of confidence relative to people who only use TurboTax Online, which is already a great product, generating a lot of confidence. See, this is just a great example of this investment in CDI and D4D really playing out in ways that our customers can feel.
It's coming out in other ways, too. For Net Promoter Scores, which is, of course, the measure of the likelihood of our customers to recommend our products to a friend or family member, it's all about virality. We measured across the board, and for our two biggest paid products, QuickBooks Online and TurboTax Online, we see a remarkable delta or advantage in their NPS score over their biggest competitors. For QuickBooks Online, it's a massive 15-point Net Promoter Score advantage versus the best global alternative in three out of our four established markets. For [QBO] well, there's a 12-point NPS advantage there, reported by our customers relative to their best alternative. This is CDI and D4D at work. Of course, as Brad said, we are a humble organization, and we recognize we can be doing better.
We can do a lot more to deliver truly awesome end-to-end experiences. These are the same customer conversion funnels that Brad ran you through just a few minutes ago. I'll review them now in terms of numbers. For quickbooks.com, we receive 46 million uniques per year, and we have a QBO, QuickBooks Online, base of 3.4 million. For TurboTax, the equivalent numbers are 95 million visits to the website and 30 million TurboTax Online returns filed last year. When I look at those numbers, I think, "Boy, we have a massive opportunity here to fish in our own backyard." As Brad said, we are obsessing over first-time use, meaning you've all had this experience. When you start using a new piece of software, you wonder where the login button is. What does that word mean? How do I really click through on this workflow?
We're obsessing over how to make all of those flows drop-dead simple across all of our products. We think that'll really move the needle on these funnels. Another great topic is our One Intuit ecosystem. I want to tell you about the Intuit Design System. Any design system is a way to ensure that all of your products feel like they came from the same source in the most important ways, so that customers just feel an innate sense of familiarity with things like that login button or the words we use or the color palettes or all these subtle flows that distinguish a good product from a truly great product. The good news is we have something called the Intuit Design System. It's winning a lot of awards for design, and it exists in most of our products, but not all of them yet.
This year, as we update our existing products and as we roll out new offerings, they're all being built on the Intuit Design System.
The One Intuit account or identity system is really the cornerstone of our ecosystem because it allows for secure access and workflows and data flows between Intuit applications and between Intuit and third-party partner applications. It also allows for the kind of person-to-person interactions that Brad talked about on a secure platform. Furthermore, we're working on improving our technology so that we can move faster, as we discover things with customer empathy, to experiment with them faster and deliver them faster to our customers. We've been moving towards a service-oriented architecture for the last few years. We're about two-thirds of the way through that journey. We've been also working to give our developers tools and processes that allow them to move faster, and take their agile story cycle time down and ever down.
Now we have some teams that are even operating at two or three days to get something pushed out to customers. Then our data, we've been moving that into the cloud. We're about 80% of the way there and expect to be done by the end of this fiscal year.
As Brad said, we're building incredible momentum one year into our new strategy, and we truly are building indispensable connections. Sometimes in life, it's great to know where you came from in order to better understand where you're going. We're just going to step back quickly in history to tell you more about our ecosystem journey. Going back to the days of Scott leading teams to create things like Quicken, our origin was in building what we would call product transactions now, looking back in history. This is really about us connecting a single customer to a single product, so we could help them in the deepest, best possible way to have a successful transaction, right? Whether that was filing taxes or getting their books done. Where we've moved to is this idea of product integrations.
Rather than having one customer, one product, what we're doing now is connecting our products, as Brad said. For example, QuickBooks Self-Employed and TurboTax Self-Employed, we've connected them so that workflows and data flow in an integrated kind of way. That's what a product integration is. Now Tayloe and I are going to walk you through two other examples to help illustrate where we're going with the ecosystem.
First, we'll talk about the identity system in a little bit more depth. Its job is to take all the data that we have, plus third-party data and a bunch of machine learning to make the job of sign up and sign in for our customers very low friction when they're good guys and nigh unto impossible when they're not. This enables sort of secure access to the right applications that they have a license to, permissioning so that the right data can flow between those applications, and permissioning so that they can interact safely and securely with other parties on our platform. This gives more benefits to our customers, as Brad said. When customers sign up for multiple products, first or third party, then they are stickier, they get more benefit from it, and enables secure access to data.
I'd like to walk you through now two things. Our QuickBooks App Store and a third-party app named Fathom, which allows people to have smart insights about their business. We know that small businesses use, on average, about 18 different applications to run their business. Obviously, we don't supply all of those, nor could we. What we can do is to supply the APIs that allow data and workflows to flow in an integrated fashion across third-party apps and things like QuickBooks Online. Of course, we are an open platform. What we've created is the QuickBooks App Store, which contains hundreds of apps for small businesses, and we use artificial intelligence to help our customers find the exact right app to solve their problems, and then they can connect them and have the data flow freely.
What Fathom does is for those QuickBooks Online customers who require more sophisticated business reporting, it allows them to run these beautiful visualizations so they can monitor current trends in their company, visualize future scenarios, and really plan for the future of their company in really effective ways. This is the power of us creating this third-party ecosystem to help our small businesses.
That starts us on our ecosystem journey, where we can connect these applications and all of these interacting parts together to power prosperity around the world. I'd like to take you through a little bit more detail on what we're doing to drive speed and excellence in our products. The first thing I want to talk about is what it is we're doing with tax. For many years now, we've been actually working to re-platform our tax systems on a modern AI-based and rules-based system that allows for much greater flexibility of the user experience and much more personalization of the user experience, while bothering the customer with fewer questions so they can get through it faster and with greater accuracy.
One of the other benefits for this is it makes it much faster for our developers to put new features and capabilities into our tax products. What used to take us a large team of people many months to get done, we can now get done with a couple of engineers in a matter of days. That enables us to speed our innovation in tax. Similarly, in QuickBooks, we've been working for many years to re-platform that, refactor that, and make our once older architecture into something that is modern and much faster to develop in. It used to be that we would do QuickBooks releases less than once a month. Now we're, in the parts of QuickBooks that have been refactored, able to do around 40 releases per month in QuickBooks. We're stepping up that speed of innovation and experimentation there.
This is largely based on our service-oriented architecture that we've been moving to. Over the last five years, we've gone from about zero to about 2,000 services. These services drive both because of reusability efficiency, but also speed, because there's a lot of stuff the developers don't have to go set about developing all by themselves because the service is already there. To prove that this is actually driving that efficiency and speed, we've actually adopted those services in some 18,000 places across all of our software. We've also, as you know, been moving to the cloud, and that really has been gaining speed. Today, I'm very happy to say that we have Mint, we have TurboTax, and we have QuickBooks Online all running 100% in AWS. Underlying all these applications is the rich set of data that we use on behalf of our customers.
That data comes from all kinds of different sources. It comes from banks, it comes from governments, it comes from payroll companies. It comes from observing our customers' behavior. Then we use that to really improve our customers' product experience, make things simpler and easier for them to use. Then that data, with their permission, flows out to the various places it needs to go, including governments in the form of tax returns, developers who need that to integrate into our ecosystem, and various other places. The flow of data through our ecosystem is really what drives it. Of course, modern artificial intelligence is driven by data, so we use all of that data to feed back into our products to improve the experiences. Just a second about data. We adopted some years ago, some principles about stewardship of data.
Our belief is that our data is not our data, it's our customer's data, and it is our job to take care of that data on their behalf in ways that they would see right. Because we adopted these principles, when things like GDPR came along, then it was a natural corollary to what we already believed in and easy for us to implement. Again, modern artificial intelligence is based on data, and we've actually been working on artificial intelligence for many years. For about a decade, we started hiring people in that field. We've been actually ramping that up very quickly over the last many years. In fact, over the last seven years, we've had about a 60% compound annual growth rate in the number of artificial intelligence, data science, and machine learning people that we've gotten on board.
Those people have been hard at work. As Brad mentioned, we today have about 70 machine learning models in production. These are across every one of our major products. This is in our customer care experiences to make those simpler and more streamlined, and it's also in our risk management to help identify fraud and other issues. Furthermore, as Brad mentioned, they've filed some 349 patents in AI, machine learning, and data science so that we can protect the moats that Brad talked about going forward in time. Let me talk about a few examples of where that shows up to bring it to life. Here, Brad had mentioned before the idea of categorization, and that's something that we've developed particular expertise in. Across all of our accounting applications, then there's some 250 billion transactions per year that we're able to categorize with about 90% accuracy.
In the case of Mint, what it does is takes those and maps those transactions to your personal expense categories automatically so you can easily see where your family expenses are going, where your money is going. Course correct as appropriate. In the case of QuickBooks Self-Employed, it actually goes beyond a swipe left, swipe right to automatically identifying whether an expense is a business or a personal expense, again, with higher accuracy than somebody can do manually after the fact. In the case of small business, it's particularly tricky because different small businesses all have different charts of accounts, and we got to take that same transaction and map it to the right place in the different charts of accounts of each of these small businesses. This is something that really has benefited our customers.
Our average QuickBooks Self-Employed customer saves some additional $4,600 a year in their taxes because of this technology. It saves some $70 million worth of work each year across our accounting products. Of course, this is protected with a number of patents and relies on the rather extraordinary data set that we have in finance and compliance. Another example that we mentioned before, I'll click down on, is QuickBooks Capital. What we do here is we use both bank data and QuickBooks data and a bunch of AI techniques on that to come up with the ability to make loans to customers that would otherwise be considered unlendable with a lower default rate than normal loans. Again, this is something that we've been working on for some time. It relies on data that we have that other people do not have.
Again, we filed a number of patents in this space to protect that mode. Switching to tax, we've been actually incorporating AI into TurboTax for many years now. Going all the way back to tax year 2014, we started to use some basic data that we knew about the customer in order to improve their flow and get them going with a streamlined experience in TurboTax. In tax year 2015, we started to introduce the concept of explain why. This is taking advantage of the rules-based system that I described earlier to backchain through all the information that the user has provided so that they can get answers to questions like, "Why is my refund not what I hoped it would be?" Get confidence that they'd actually filled out their return correctly.
We also introduced, in order to streamline the experience, a very accurate way of funneling users into itemized versus standardized deductions so that they could save a lot of time and be accurate in the process. In the next tax year, we started getting more fine-grained in our categories for self-employed deductions, this is where our categorization technology comes into play, so that they could get a bigger, honest refund for their work.
We started introducing, this goes into the customer care side, actually in the experience of the product, real-time as the user is going through it, personalized answers that's drawing from all the data that we know about that customer that they've entered so far, that we've been able to gather for them so far, and comparing them with all the other customers so that they can get answers to the questions that are most likely to occur to people who are most like them. Another application of machine learning. Finally, in the upcoming tax year, we're using the data set and machine learning to provide a highly accurate estimate of what your refund is going to be early on in the experience, again, drawing on information about people who are very much like you in a similar tax situation.
That's just many examples of how it is we've been applying AI across our product set. With that.
That's our overview of our first three priorities, accelerating velocity and doing what's right for customers. We're creating a One Intuit ecosystem of indispensable connections. It's built upon product integrations and people interactions, and it's rooted in speed, data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Thank you very much.
Thank you. With that, let me invite Sasan up to the stage.
Great job.
All right. Good morning. I'm going to focus on a couple of things in my time up here. One is just to share some proof points that our strategy is working. Secondarily, why we are optimistic when we think about the future. Last year, we added 1 million customers, and it took us 15 years to get to our first million. Frankly, what's most exciting is all of the interactions. There was $240 million of invoices that our customers sent. There was $373 billion of money that flowed in and out of the platform. We connected almost 60% of our small businesses to accountants. We connected almost 34% of our customers to other apps. What's most important is the interactions, which allows us to solve additional problems for our customers.
The more customers we add to the platform, the more interactions, the more we can leverage all the data to deliver more innovation for our customers. That is what led to the 40% online ecosystem revenue growth. Our focus is first to get the customer in to deliver that benefit that they are looking for. The second, once we nail that benefit, find other services that they are looking for. It could be payments, it could be time tracking, it could be QuickBooks Capital, it could be connections to other apps and other people. Ultimately, that is a rinse and repeat strategy that we have, and that's why we have confidence when we think about the progress that we're making and everything that you heard Brad talk about.
As we look to the future, let me just share what our game plan is, I want to start with refreshing you again of what's most important to our customers. As you heard Brad talk about, small businesses drive 50% of the global economy. They also, about 50% of them go out of business after five years. We take that very personal because we view that it's our job to help them thrive. The things that are the most important to them are getting customers and keeping their customers. It's really about getting paid the way their customers want to pay them. It's about having access to capital when they need it most. It's about finding reliable workers, whether full-time or contingent workers, and being able to pay them. Those needs are all universal.
Whether when I travel to Edmonton, Toronto, London, Paris, Bangalore, anywhere that I go and visit customers, the needs are exactly the same. What's different is the local compliance that I'll talk about later. With that as context, we have 85 million customers in the countries that we're in our serviceable market opportunity. Last year, we grew and compelled 34% more of our customers to come to our landing pages to quickbooks.com so we could serve them. That allowed us to drive subs growth. As you heard from Brad, you heard from Diego, you heard from Tayloe, our biggest opportunity is to nail that first-time use. We are still not where we want to be. We've made a lot of progress, but we are so inspired by what's possible when we look ahead. Let me walk you through how we're going to do that.
The starting point is our strategy. It is what Brad talked about. It's about unlocking the power of many for the prosperity of one. What does that mean? It's about being an open, trusted platform where we leverage all of the data, all the interactions across the platform, apply technology, machine learning, to ultimately deliver innovation that matters most to our customers, and it's in the three areas that you heard Brad talk about. It's finding ways to put more money in their pocket, eliminating work and drudgery so they can focus on their passion, and doing it in a way that they are absolutely confident. Here's how we're doing that. At the end of it, this comes down to the platform and the products that we build.
Let me just paint the picture of our platform vision, everything that we've talked about falls in the context of where we're trying to head and what we're building. There are three elements. It's about smart money, smart decisions, and smart connections. The biggest issue with our customers is cash flow. They don't understand all of the money going in and money going out. Our vision is that a customer can easily understand their cash flow, that they can hold onto their money the longest, the hard-earned money that they've worked for, that they can get paid the fastest, any which way their customers want to pay them. Last but not least, on a click, they can get access to money. Smart decisions.
Our customers, just like all of us, are trying to make decisions every single day, except they don't have the infrastructure that we do. They don't have access to all the data that we do. A lot of times, they have to do a lot of work to try to make those decisions. Who's the right customer? Are they paying me on time? Are they credit worthy? Am I going to run out of cash flow before I have to make payroll Friday? Our vision is that a customer never has to lift a finger, and they will have the insights at their fingertips to make all of their critical decisions. Then smart connections. The reality is our customers are very lonely. They don't have all the connections that we have, and this is a connected world.
Our vision around smart connections is to unlock the power of our network. It's the interactions I was talking about earlier to connect our customers to the accountant that they need, to the application that they need, to the customer that has demand for their products, to the workers that they need to do the work for them, and for the worker that's looking for work. That's our vision of what we are building. Let me share some proof points in terms of the progress that we've made, and I'll start with smart money. First of all, the opportunity is huge. It's a $100 billion opportunity. As I mentioned, just last year, our customers invoiced 240 million times, but only 14% was payment enabled. One out of four of our customers have access to money, and almost all of them need access to capital.
35% of the population is still doing payroll manually, and those that don't do it manually, typically the money has to go out of their bank 10 to 14 days in advance. Just in this last year, I'll highlight a couple of areas of significant innovation. One is the invoicing experience. We're improving our approval rate by learning more about the customer. We're improving the experience so the customer not only sends an invoice, but it's payment enabled. Our innovation is coming in the form of making sure that their customers can pay them the way they want, whether it's credit card, whether it's ACH, whether it's PayPal, whether it's Square, whatever way their customers want to pay them. The second is just this last year, our cumulative loans were $140 million.
60% of the customers that we provided loans to would have never been able to access capital. In payroll, significant innovation that's not on the page, but I'll highlight a few. Almost 50% of folks that come to quickbooks.com that are looking for payroll, they don't want anything else, and in the past, we wouldn't just let them buy payroll. This past year, we launched Payroll First. If you want to come and you just want payroll, we'll let you buy payroll, and then we will unlock it to other benefits on the ecosystem. With our full-service payroll product, we now have instant deposit. If you do your payroll before 10:00 A.M., the money will go out of your account and into the employer's account same day. That's 10 to 14 days of saving our customers money and leaving more of the money for them.
Our vision is to create a world where our customers understand their cash flow immediately, and we are proud of the progress that we made this past year. Smart decisions. There's two elements of this. The first element is 46 million folks come to our website, and they're looking for something. Some of them are just looking to invoice and get paid. Some of them are just looking for payroll. Some of them are actually looking to see if there's a way they can get loans. Some of them come because their accountant told them to come to QuickBooks. The point is they come for very different reasons. We are very focused on first-time engagement to ensure that we deliver the benefit that they are looking for and nailing that benefit.
We improved first-time benefit this year, and our conversion increased, but we have so much headroom, and we are so excited about what our teams are working on. The second is when customers are in. Almost 40% of our customers are looking for answers to their cash flow, and what we launched in the fall of 2017 is what's called QuickBooks Assistant. That's the picture that you see here. It will completely revolutionize the industry and change the world for our customers. Think Alexa, think Google Home. With this, customers can ask questions. Who owes me money? How much money did I make this month? How does it compare to last year? Am I gonna have enough cash flow to make payroll? Every time a question is asked, we are learning from the questions the customer is asking.
If we can't answer it, we get better by applying artificial intelligence to get better for the next time, and then proactively providing those insights. Our vision is that a customer never has to lift a finger, and that we can help them make decisions so they can thrive. Last but not least is smart connections. As I mentioned earlier, for our customers, it's a very small world out there. When you talk to small businesses, what they'll say is, "I'm looking to talk to an expert. I'm looking for the right customers for my products. How do I market to them? Boy, I'm looking for reliable workers." Our vision is to unlock the power of our network. The more customers we get, the more interactions, the more we can power the prosperity of one.
That's why Brad talked about the fact that we launched matchmaking so that we can match our customers to accountants, because when we do, they're 89% more likely to be successful, and our LTV actually goes up 3X. We launched a marketplace so that our accountants, using our artificial intelligence, we propose to them what apps are most important to them. They can manage and provision it for their clients. This is what's ultimately driving the retention that we're seeing, because ultimately, we're connecting our customers to the folks that matter most. The reason you should care about this is that this is, by the way, an example of a cohort of customers from 2014, where they, in this case, the customers came in because an accountant told them to go buy the platform, so it was for accounting.
You can see we solve other problems for them. On average, we're getting paid $1,300 a month. The point here is that we have a rinse and repeat strategy, which is solve the most important problem for the customer, get as many customers as we can on the platform, because we do know how, over time, we can monetize. We are taking this game to the mid-market. The way we define mid-market is 10 to 100 employees. It's a $40 billion opportunity, one and a half million customers. We actually know how to play this game. We already do it with our desktop platform. 140,000 customers. It's over a $400 million business. We just launched QBO Advanced because we believe that there's a huge opportunity because these customers are over-served.
This could be a huge opportunity for us to really power the prosperity of customers in that 10-100 segment that are being over-served, we believe that this could be a big opportunity for Intuit as we look in the out years. Everything that I just mentioned, when you look at how it played out by country, we're pleased with our progress in the established markets. Net Promoter is up, our subs growth is up, as we focus on the ecosystem services to deliver benefits for our customers, we believe that we can help them thrive and help power prosperity for each customer. In our established markets, we're actually pleased with our progress, let me first set context and remind you of what our goal is in each country. In Brazil, it was, can we actually make an acquisition work?
In France, it's a very heavy compliance market. Our goal was to understand, if we can solve those compliance needs for these customers, we can solve it anywhere we choose to go around the globe. By the way, France is where U.S. was about 20-25 years ago. Category is large, it's all desktop, small businesses are pushing to go to the cloud. In India, it's about, can we find ways to monetize beyond user pay? We're making good progress in each of the countries. We're doing a much better job getting to product-market fit. Our active use is up in every country. Our Product Recommendation Score is up in every country. We're seeing green shoots, like in France, where accountants are actually buying, using, and recommending QuickBooks to their clients. If I could, let me finish where I started.
We feel like our strategy is working. We are driving significant subs growth, what's most important is the interactions and the opportunity to deliver more benefits for our customers. That's where the ecosystem comes in. It's about solving problems that matter most to our customers with all the services that we are innovating on, our third parties are innovating on. We continue to be inspired by what's possible outside of the United States with the 60%+ subs growth that we delivered. That's ultimately what leads us to 10%-15% long-term expectation that we have of ourselves and what we wanted to reaffirm with you. With that, I'll bring Kim up.
Thank you. Thanks so much, Sasan. We're heading into our break. I'll just remind you, our gallery walk is going to be open, and you can go and see the QuickBooks Assistant that Sasan just mentioned. Also, we have plenty of coffee, to get to the bathrooms, again, straight out, turn left, around through the demo area, and to your right. Let's take about an hour, so be back here at 10:20, please. Thank you.
Hey, bro. Play. Okay, bro. Let's play.
All right, bro, I'm going to call it a night.
Okay, bro. I'll talk to you later. Have a good one.
See you.
Hi, this is Nick. Have a nice day.
Ladies and gentlemen, our program will resume in a few moments. If you'll please make way to your seats. Thank you very much.
If everyone could come in and take your seats, I think we're about ready to get started. Hopefully, you were able to see a lot of the really cool demos at the gallery walk, and you'll have more time, during lunch to see those as well. Two more quick announcements before we get started. One, I just wanted to mention that we're featuring a couple of our QuickBooks customers here today. One of them you'll actually see at the dessert station at lunch, and then a couple others, as part of our parting favors that you can grab on your way out. That's number 1. Number 2, we'll be sending a survey for your feedback at the end of the program today. Your feedback is really important to us. We really want to figure out how we can make this day most valuable to you.
We'd really appreciate you taking two minutes to fill it out. With that, let's get started. It is my pleasure to introduce Greg Johnson.
Thank you. All right, we're almost in the home stretch. Just affirming our mission. You've heard a lot about it today, powering prosperity around the world. That certainly is something we're committed to in the consumer group. It's actually a source of inspiration for us. The way that translates for us is our ambition to go after a big problem in America. Our ambition is to deliver financial freedom for all of our consumers. When I say financial freedom, we're talking about freedom from worry, worrying about whether or not you maximize your refund, whether or not you've minimized your liabilities. If you worry about how much money is in your pocket, can you pay your bills on time? Are you getting the best rates? Are you going to qualify for a loan? These worries just weigh on our customers.
The closer we get to our customers, the closer we understand the opportunity we have to make a difference in their lives. Financial freedom for all consumers is the way that we are going to contribute to our mission of powering prosperity around the world. When we think about this mission, we can't do it alone. This isn't about the consumer group or TurboTax trying to solve this big problem. We need to leverage our brothers and sisters across our ecosystem. We need to leverage the ecosystem and our capabilities, and together, we believe we can make meaningful progress. One of the most enabling aspects of our ecosystem has to do with the number of relationships we enjoy. When we think about the relationships within the ecosystem, we have over 25 million registered users of Mint and Turbo. Over 50 million unique filers in TurboTax.
Through our QuickBooks platform, over 10 million consumers receive payroll. We have a network of professionals, tax experts, that serve over 30 million customers in the assisted tax space. Perhaps the biggest relationship we have is with financial institutions. Over 20,000 financial institutions that cover over 95% of the consumer market. Those relationships translated into a digital world means data. As you heard earlier, we are the stewards of our customers' data. If you take our mission, our capabilities across our ecosystem, the relationships we have, and the data that we're entrusted with, we can make big things happen, and that's our focus. The way that we expressed it over the last couple of years is that we're on a journey to deliver financial freedom. This is the roadmap. It starts with DIY tax, extending our lead in DIY tax.
That means winning in DIY tax, growing share, and continuing to delight customers. We're going to do that by improving our experience. We still have many opportunities to improve our experience in tax, but also to bring more innovation to the market. Beyond winning in DIY tax, you know that we made a significant bet with respect to our ability to bring our technology, our capabilities, the data that we have, and put that in service of our customers and connect customers who are seeking experts to experts who are seeking to help customers. TurboTax Live is a massive innovation. It's a two-sided platform, and at the heart of it is a better way to do your taxes. We believe that that is going to be a way for us to penetrate that 84 million market, 84 million filers, and $20 billion of TAM.
Beyond that, what I would say is that we have a third part of our strategy that we announced a year ago that's actually out there in market right now. Historically, we thought of our landscape being consumer tax. The reality of it is that we've also entered into a new category, a new industry, the world of consumer finance. Within that world, we have the aspiration and the ambition to create a platform, a consumer finance platform that connects customers to financial partners and institutions in service of the joint desire to get access to more money at better rates. Our approach is not to think like an application, but to think like a platform.
When we do this, one of the things that we've learned is that by being a platform business in consumer finance, it gives rise to a different kind of monetization model. We've been monetizing directly for years. What this enables us to do is to move to indirect monetization, a beyond user paid model, where partners are willing to pay for leads and converted customers at a significant rate. I'll talk more about that in a little bit. The last part of our strategy has to do with financial identity. Financial identity in our context means it's a big problem. Consumers have their financial data spread out in many places.
We see an opportunity to bring that together, organize it, make sure that it's verified and validated, bring that data together, link it to a consumer profile that reflects not just their TurboTax data or Turbo data, but data that exists within our ecosystem and outside of our ecosystem. When you bring that together, store it securely, and with their consent, in very specific use cases, make that data portable. With the financial identity, making that data portable will unlock benefits like pre-qualification for loans. Across America, 76% of consumers actually get declined when applying for a loan. 76% of consumers get declined rather than being accepted. One of the reasons is getting all the data, it takes a lot of work, a lot of effort, and prone to a lot of mistakes and incompleteness. Financial identity is focused on solving that problem.
That problem just doesn't exist in the U.S. The opportunities that we described across the four legs of our roadmap exist globally. We're working in Canada and India to win here in the market, but also to start to prepare our platform, our technology, and starting to run experiments to figure out market fit beyond the U.S. We're pretty excited about the roadmap. If we follow this over the next five to 10 years, we'll realize a significant progress in our ambition to address the financial dreams of America. Let me talk about our tax business first. Our tax business, this is a view of the last 10 years. It's the total industry landscape. The good news as you look at this chart is that TurboTax is doing pretty well relative to others.
What's driven our success is our maniacal focus on our customers in winning share in our DIY market. That focus has served us well over the years. When you look at this market, there's something else that we see is the biggest part of the market is this assisted market. This is an assisted space that hasn't changed tremendously. The reason that is the customers that are in there are desiring access to experts. They need help, they need assistance, and we think that's an opportunity that although we've experimented around over the years, we haven't gone after in earnest. We are now. We launched a platform that we'll talk about later, TurboTax Live, that actually is focused on us changing our perspective.
Not only do we want to win share in DIY and extend our lead, but our ambition is to grow share across the total tax industry. This upcoming year is going to be interesting. It's going to be fun, actually. We have tax reform. Tax reform is significant changes to the Form 1040. What that means is it's going to impact virtually every single tax filer in America in some way and somehow. The good news about that is that that change is positive. For one thing, the ambition of a lot of the changes are to simplify our tax code, we have long been a proponent of that. By increasing the standard deduction and increasing those eligible for the standard deduction, what you'll have is massive simplification for customers. We know in this business that simplification leads to DIY category growth.
As a matter of fact, TurboTax is based on that premise. If we can remove the work, remove the complexity from doing your taxes, remove the friction, the category will grow. We think simplification is a tailwind, if you will, for us and the DIY category as a whole. The other aspect of tax reform, though, is that it's going to create a lot of confusion. People are going to try to figure out, consumers and our filers are going to try to figure out, what does it mean to me? With my forms gone away now, what form do I file? What do I qualify for? There are going to be a lot of questions. There's going to be confusion. What we do know is that when consumers are confused, they tend to gravitate towards people they trust and brands that they trust.
From our perspective in this environment, TurboTax is well positioned as a leadership brand to take advantage of that as well. The third dynamic that we expect to happen as a result of tax reform has to do with the amount of uncertainty around things like your refund. Is my refund going to be smaller? Is it going to be bigger? That is the core question on the minds of every one of our filers, because at the end of the day, their tax return is their biggest paycheck of their year. When it comes to uncertainty and with such high stakes, people have questions, and they want help and assistance. We had 433 million interactions last year in our DIY product with our help system. That's consumers trying to figure out, trying to learn and educate themselves in how to navigate the tax experience.
That's a lot of demand. We expect that to go up. The good news is we have a world-class, best-in-class self-help system that has 433 million interactions and learn from each interaction. As a result, we're able to personalize our answers, personalize the advice that we give in the self-help product. The other part that we've done with TurboTax Live is for those customers that aren't satisfied with that answer, we've created many access points in the product for them to on-demand access an expert through TurboTax Live. The combination of a world-class self-help platform that's AI and ML driven and the innovation associated with our TurboTax Live, we believe we're well positioned to capitalize on the uncertainty that's going to exist in the category. One thing I would tell you is that we know that there's going to be risks.
You all know that there is going to be some risks, and those risks show up in the form of trade down. These are customers that are able to trade down, willing to trade down because they can. They're value seekers, right? With the expansion of the standard deduction, that's going to create an opportunity for customers to file for free even in our product. That trade-down risk is something that we're very aware of, we have our eyes on, the fact that we're aware of it allows us to experiment. It allows us to get closer to customers and find out strategies around how we're going to address that. Our key approach is going to be to deliver benefits to our customers that don't cause them to trade down for price, but rather inspire them to trade up for benefits and value.
I used to work at Gillette, and we were famous for the trade-up model, right? The Mach3, then we kept the Fusion, the five blades. The reality of across this industry, certainly across America, this tendency to trade up to more aspirational products defines many categories. As a matter of fact, it defines the assistant category. There are over 30 million simple filers today that go to a pro and pay over $200 in order to get their return filed when they can do it for free, probably in minutes. Why is that? They're willing to trade up, they value the expertise, they value the security and the comfort and the confidence they get when they connect with an expert. For all those reasons, we also think tax reform is going to provide some trade-down risk for price sensitive customers.
More likely, it will create trade-up opportunities for those aspirational filers seeking more benefits within the new context. Let me just quickly go to our consumer funnel. I'm going to talk a little bit about our customer growth specifically. This is in the U.S. This is our acquisition funnel we've referred to a couple of times so far today. There's 152 million filers in FY 2018 in the U.S. 95 million of those visit our website. That is in the context of tax reform, we do see that as an opportunity for us to continue to expand the top of our funnel. Beyond that, of that 95 million, currently 63 million consider DIY. We see that as an opportunity as well. If we can bring more innovation to market and make our products more accessible, we will drive more consideration of the category.
Of that 63 million, only 43 million go on to start. Our first use experience needs to get better. Customers that visit us with the intent and interest in DIY who leave us and never log in is a massive opportunity. Of the 43 million that log in, only 30 million go on to file. We lose 13 million along the way because of friction, fear, uncertainty and doubt, breakdown in confidence. We can do better. The good news is over the last year, by virtue of the innovations in our core product and bringing TT Live to market, you'll see that we reversed the trend in our attrition. Our retentions rates are up 200 basis points. That's our plan.
We know we can work this funnel, grow our business even more aggressively if we in fact harness all of our capabilities and attack all aspects of the funnel. That's our plan on the customer side. On the revenue side, the consumer tax industry is $21 billion. As you know right now, we have 27% of share of returns, but only 11% share of the revenue. That exists because we've been fishing and living within the context of DIY. With TurboTax Live, we're going to go into the other part of the industry, that $19 billion of TAM. The currency in that part of the industry is expertise. It's access to experts. That's what defines the category. TurboTax Live is our opportunity to go through and transform that marketplace. Each year, about 10 and a half million customers churn within that marketplace.
They churn because they're looking for more convenience, they're looking for lower price and better outcomes. TurboTax Live is positioned for us to try to solve some big problems in that space. When you look at our average price per return and how we've grown that over the last two years, we've done that by innovating at the high end. The year before last, it was self-employed, and it continues to be an accelerant to our growth. That's driven our average revenue per return up, and now with TurboTax Live, we see that accelerate. Even then, when you compare that to the average price per return in the assisted market, we are still at a value relative to the other alternatives. Our strategy is going to be this: We want to win by delivering a superior value equation, better benefits, better experiences at a lower price.
That combination, we think, will allow us to start to penetrate the overall assisted market. We are focused on growing total share as well as total revenue share of the category. Over the last two years, we've communicated a lot of change, right? We've talked about a new strategy, a new roadmap. We've launched TurboTax Live. We've launched Turbo. We're talking about financial identity. There's a lot of change going on as we transform. As we look back to this last year, this is our scorecard, these are the things that we had promised a year ago, that we would extend our lead in DIY. I'm proud to say that we did expand the DIY category, that we did grow share within the category. By the way, we increased our retention.
We talked about the notion of transforming the assisted category with products like TT Live. We launched and scaled a virtual workforce platform last year. We launched TT Live, and ultimately, we delighted customers and pros. We talked about moving beyond tax in the world of consumer finance, a whole new industry for us. Not only do we have Mint, but we also have Turbo, and we built a platform. A platform that connects consumers to partners for the shared goal of getting access to more money. In our first year of launching Turbo, we had 5 million registered users in our first 4 months in the market. Finally, that all yielded pretty outstanding results we were pretty excited about. You can see those there, the revenue, the operating income growth, and importantly, the customer share growth.
I will tell you, we take pride in our ability to execute. We take pride in our ability to declare something and deliver against it. That's the key to our success, and that's what we're going to focus on going forward. One example, I'm going to go through just a quick example across our roadmap of what's ahead for us. When it comes to extending our lead in DIY, the reality is, after over 30 years, the simplest of filers, their experience isn't that simple still. We have opportunities to continue to innovate. The opportunity is represented in the funnel. When we talked about the 63 million customers that are interested, but only 43 million that log in, and only 30 million that file. 13 million start with us, and they leave sometime in the process because of friction.
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt, the work it takes, they abandon. We call them abandoners. That is a massive opportunity. A few proof points for you. If you're the simplest of filers, it takes over 500 fills and interactions for you to complete your return. 500 fills and interactions for you to complete your return if you're the simplest of filers. We can do better than that. If you look at the data that we have, and you look at our ability to create AI and ML models that take advantage of that, we can start to pre-fill, we can eliminate unnecessary questions, we can eliminate duplicative questions, and we can reduce that experience significantly. That's what we're going to do. 200 is just representing the starting point. We can go further than that. Our vision for taxes are done still inspires us, and we're going after that.
The other thing, though, it's not just about removing screens. The real issues are lack of confidence. They leave along the way, not because of the number of screens, it's because they have help. They have questions that they don't get sufficient answers to. One thing we focused on this past year that paid dividends for us that we're now accelerating is our ability to deliver highly personalized answers. Not generic answers to a question, but answers that are specifically related to you and your experience. This past year, that was 30% of our answers, and we expect to grow that significantly as we go forward. In summary, how are we going to win in DIY? The reality of it is our experience isn't that simple, but we're going to make huge strides to make it simpler this next year and more confidence-inspiring.
Let me talk a little bit about transforming the assisted category. 84 million filers go to assisted because they're seeking some kind of assistance. They spend over $20 billion of their hard-earned money to get that assistance. 10 million or so churn each year because they're not satisfied with their expert, and they go on to look for another expert. That's an opportunity for us to address. TurboTax Live is inspired by the reality that consumers are seeking experts to help them file taxes, and experts that file taxes are continuing to try to grow their practices in looking for customers. That's a network, and we have a virtual workforce platform built and scaled to take advantage of this dynamic. Last year with TurboTax Live, a few results and proof points just to demonstrate that we're on the right path.
The first thing is, if you filed in TurboTax Live versus TurboTax Live, you had a 19-point increase in confidence and a PRS score of 63. I will tell you, when we put that product out in the market last year, we muscled it into the market. Muscled meaning it wasn't optimized on the consumer experience nor the pro experience. Even despite that, we're able to get into market, and we deliver more confidence as well as delight. The other thing that we observed, one of those cohorts that historically converted at a very low rate are first-time filers, new filers. New filers that actually came on our platform and interact with an expert had a 23-point increase in conversion. As you know, we said earlier, one of the big opportunities in our funnel is around conversion. TurboTax Live is poised to help do that.
Winning in TurboTax Live is not just about winning on the consumer side. We also need to win on the pro side. On the pro side, what we figured out is how to deliver experience and continue to iterate. At second peak, as soon as the second peak ended, we surveyed our pros. In full, 95% of our pros signaled and stated their intent to come back and work on the platform. That's significant pro retention. That's going to advantage us as we continue to build our platform this year. It will give us a very fast start. The other thing that I would share with you as a proof point, we take product recommendation scores, almost like a Net Promoter of our pros at first peak. We did it again at second peak. What we saw is a 50% increase in our PRS scores.
What that means to us is that what we launched was not very good, and by the time we got to second peak, we made it appreciably better. I will tell you that since then, we've been working hard on that platform, making our tools more accessible, eliminated wasting time and effort, so our pros can spend more time working with customers rather than trying to figure out our systems. There's opportunities for us to continue on the pro side and on the consumer side, one thing that we noticed is that we really didn't understand our core target when we launched TurboTax Live initially. One of the big surprises for us is that on this platform, those most interested, many of them are simple filers.
There are many of the 30 million simple filers that today pay a lot of money to go to a pro, but we've discovered they're interested in TurboTax Live. When you think about that dynamic, last year, we did not have TurboTax Live accessible for free customers. In other words, there was no on-ramp for free customers. There were no on-ramp for simple customers, and we didn't have a mobile offering. 50% of our customer base uses mobile device at some point in time when filing their tax return. Fundamentally, there's a massive opportunity. We feel really good where we are, and we're pretty excited about where we're heading. The last part of the strategy I'll talk about today has to do with us moving from beyond just consumer tax, but to the world of consumer finance.
Probably the way that I think about it, the way that we think about it is consumer finance needs to be personalized. They need to move from consumer finance to personal finance. If we can figure out how to personalize our experiences, we think that we can make significant progress in delivering the benefit that they seek most, which is access to more money. The opportunity, we have 50 million tax relationships today. Those are our unique filers in our products that we can move beyond just getting them the biggest refund check, but we also can go beyond that and help their financial lives. We have 25 million registered users of both Mint and Turbo and growing. Those 25 million users have already demonstrated interest in getting a better financial outcome or interest in having a better financial life. We just need to help them.
We can do that. We can do that in a number of ways. The first thing that's most important, they need to indicate that they have interest in our helping them, and we do that through getting consent to use their data. The way that we can help is put their data to work for them. This past year, we had 20 million users who gave us consent to leverage their data in pursuit of very unique use cases, things like personal loans, auto loans, credit card applications, mortgage applications. Those use cases are some of those signals of demand for a better way of approaching consumer finance and make it more personal. I'll give you two big stats that just blew us away that we never would have predicted this past year.
When we talk to customers and we ask for their consent to use data in order to pre-qualify for a loan, we had a 95% conversion rate, 95% consent rate. That is 95% of the customers said, "Yes, please use my most valued data in order to pre-qualify." The other part of the story isn't just about that promise, did we deliver? What we found is the conversion rate was 9X. Whenever we used the data to pre-qualify, they converted at a 9X rate versus just a static offer. That tells us that not only is it promise made, but it's promise delivered, and we see massive opportunities. A very different use case than pre-qualification. By the way, you remember I told you the big problem was 76% of people that apply for a loan get denied? That pre-qualification is a massive consumer benefit.
The second area has to do with the ability to pre-fill applications. The reality is if you go through and if you filed a mortgage, if you applied for a mortgage recently, you know that there are hundreds and hundreds of fields that need to get done, pages of work. What we promise here is that if we can harness your data and actually pre-fill the application, remove some of the friction, some of the work, and reduce the amount of effort. What consumers told us, 96.5% of them said, "Yes, sign me up. Leverage the data in order to pre-fill the applications and give me a jump start." That wasn't quite as surprising because that's what we use in TurboTax.
We've already learned that data can help you remove work and friction, that benefit of no work is very core to the way that we'll maintain our superiority in the marketplace. Those that actually used the pre-fill went on to convert at a 3X rate, we know we got them to the benefit. When it comes to our beyond tax strategy, it's about us going into the world of consumer finance and making the world of consumer finance more personal by leveraging our relationships, our data, and our capabilities that exist across the ecosystem. By doing that, along with the other strategies we talked about, we think we can make significant progress towards delivering against financial freedom for all our consumers.
This is a way of summarizing it for us, I did share all the aspects of our growth, everywhere from how do we extend our lead in DIY, how do we transform the market? What does financial freedom mean in the context of consumer finance? What progress are we making? All those initiatives and all those strategies are pointed at where we think is the big addressable market to accelerate the growth of our business. As a consequence of that, as we think about our long-term growth drivers and we communicate, what do we think growth to happen for our business? Historically, we've shared a 5%-10% long-term growth range. We feel good about taking that long-term growth projection up to 8%-12%.
We're feeling really good and very bullish about the direction we're headed in, and we have a lot of reasons to believe that we're on the right path. With that, Michelle, you want to Michelle Clatterbuck.
Thank you.
Yes.
Thank you.
Want a hug?
Have a hug, come on. We hug here. That's what we do. Oh, goodness. Okay. Thank you, Greg, first of all. Good morning, everyone. It's great to see everyone here. I'd like to say thank you for everyone joining us, whether here or on the webcast. I'd like to say thank you for all of your support over this past year of Intuit. We really do appreciate it. I also really appreciate your attention. We've given you a lot of material, a lot of facts per second this morning. We're almost to the Q&A section. I'm going to share how our strategy translates into our financial results, and most importantly, the financial principles that guide our thinking. Let me start with a look back. As Brad said, this is the last time we get to talk about FY 2018.
On the left side of the slide, you will see last year's point that we shared at Investor Day. On the right side, you'll see how we did. Our performance in 2018 was strong across each of our businesses. QuickBooks Online subscribers grew 43%, and small business online ecosystem revenue grew 10 points faster than our 30% target. We're equally pleased with the strong results that we had in our consumer business, which we started off with 7% to 9% revenue guidance, and we ended up with 14% growth. Now, as a company, we always shoot for double-digit revenue growth, and we grew 15% last year, which was up 5 points from 2017. Non-GAAP operating income grew 14%, which was up 2% versus the prior year, and this led to non-GAAP earnings per share growth of 27%.
Overall, it was a really good year, and I couldn't be more proud of the team that delivered these results. You've all seen this before. One thing that doesn't change year after year is our True North framework. It guides us in everything that we do. Now, this is more than just words on a page or a fancy chart on the wall. It's actually the fundamental way that we manage our business each and every day, driving the decisions that we make. Now, Brad already touched on many elements of this framework, I'm going to highlight one in particular. We have four stakeholders that we're solving for, and we make decisions with these four groups in mind: our employees, our customers, our partners, and our shareholders.
Now, we believe that talented, engaged employees doing the best work of their lives to solve customer problems hand in hand with our partners is the best way to deliver outcomes for shareholders. Now, decisions must balance the short and the long, which means delivering against our commitments to the board and to you, our shareholders, in the current period, while ensuring we're set up for strong and durable performance for many years to come. We shared with you that we gauge our results not against a static target, but rather against the best competitor or alternative. This ensures we're delivering for each of our stakeholders. We call this delivering best we can be results. Now, for employees, this means enabling the world's top talent to do the best work of their lives. For our customers, we remain focused on delivering unparalleled benefits.
For partners, we work together to add value for our customers, but we also strive to make sure that their experience working with us is a delightful one. Of course, you, our investors. Our focus is on growing our customer base and increasing the velocity of connections within our One Intuit ecosystem to drive long-term growth. We invest our capital in the highest yield opportunities. We increase shareholder value and provide an attractive return that's attractive relative to our peers. We use our financial principles to guide these decisions. These principles are largely unchanged from a year ago, but you should know that we do challenge these and discuss them each and every year as we go into our three and one-year planning process. We reaffirm as a management team and then with the board.
I'm going to dive into each of these a little bit deeper. First, organic double-digit revenue growth. Given the market opportunity we have and our focus on delivering customer benefits, we think this is an objective that we should strive for each and every year. We focus on growing operating income dollars faster than revenue. We think it's a good discipline for us to approach each year with an expectation that expenses will grow slower than revenue does. As we've said, we manage margins at the company level, so I wouldn't focus too much on the small changes in operating margin of a business unit, given the leverage we get from cross-company platform investments. We apply rigorous principles to our internal investments as well. For example, measuring lifetime value to customer acquisition costs as we enter a new market for QBO.
We deploy cash to the highest yield opportunities, targeting a 15% return on investment over 5 years. This principle is key to managing our business for both the short term and the long term. We strive to make the best investments throughout the year. We actively change resource allocations based on developments that we see out in the market. This threshold is key to making all of our internal investments that'll deliver for years to come. We also apply the same hurdle to any acquisitions that we may be looking at. After this, we return excess cash to shareholders. This speaks to our stewardship of how we handle the capital we generate and comes in the form of buybacks and dividends. On share repurchases, we utilize a smart grid to achieve a rate of return over time that exceeds our own cost of capital.
Finally, we manage a conservative investment-grade balance sheet that can sustain our business through all types of economic cycles. This has served us well in the past and actually lets us lean in during a downturn. I mentioned the market opportunity as a critical input to how we're thinking about growth, more specifically, our ability to grow revenue double digits. It all starts with healthy customer growth. Here on the left side of this slide, you'll see our latest summary of the customer opportunity in small business. As Sasan highlighted earlier, in addition to the TAM figures that you've seen before, you'll now see SAM, which is the serviceable addressable market. This is designed to give you a better sense of how we view the more immediate available market in each country based on our go-to-market plans.
We still have a huge opportunity ahead of us in the U.S., there are additional opportunities all over the world for our product and broader ecosystem. Across the business, we continue to focus on achieving product-market fit in new markets and delivering awesome first-time use, while also driving improved ecosystem experiences that we can monetize. You've already seen the initial results with some of the recent acceleration of our online services. We continue to focus on monetizing our customer base while also adding new customers. Looking on the right side of the slide, you'll see total paying customers. This includes QuickBooks Online, our desktop subscribers, and desktop unit sales. The key point I want to highlight here is that our total net adds continues to grow. We saw total paying customers increase 26% in fiscal 2018.
Our desktop base remains relatively sticky. We're seeing new customers who are choosing QBO. While some of our desktop customers are migrating to the cloud, we're adding even more new customers to the franchise. As Greg Johnson said earlier, we're equally excited about the opportunity to grow customers and revenue in the consumer business. We continue to see nice tailwinds in the DIY category, and we expect to grow customers and extend our lead through innovation. Tax reform presents us with real opportunities that we believe will be a net positive to our business. We expect that simplification will accelerate DIY category growth. As Greg Johnson mentioned, TurboTax is a trusted brand, and we expect consumers will choose the brands they trust most during a period of change. If tax reform increases demand for help and assistance, we can deliver that with our TurboTax Live offering.
TurboTax Live also provides us the opportunity to transform the category, opening up the $20 billion assisted tax prep market. Greg Johnson mentioned that scaling of this product may mean that revenue will continue to grow faster than customers, and we saw this last year with unit growth of 4% and revenue growth of 14%. This will likely drive our revenue growth faster than units over the next several years. As we increase the value we provide to customers, we are also able to improve monetization. While ARPC is an outcome of customer and revenue growth for us, we understand that it's a key input for your models. We provide this, a high-level look at it every year.
Looking at QBO worldwide, we saw an increase in our ARPC this year, driven by our U.S. business, and that was partially offset by our non-U.S. business. Going forward, we expect QBO Worldwide ARPC to increase. We see this being driven by our maturing base in the U.S., and increased monetization from attached services, and pricing for value as we add more features that deliver our customer benefits. Outside of the U.S., we expect to see an increase in ARPC from some lower promotional activity. In the desktop business, we continue to see our ARPC increase due to strong growth in our enterprise solutions, which we expect to continue. ARPC for these offerings tends to average more than about 5x what we would see for desktop. In addition, retention of our most complex and valuable customers on the desktop platform remains strong.
Moving to consumer, we saw another year of strong ARPC increases due to attach and mix shift following the introduction of TurboTax Live, as well as some pricing for value as we deliver more benefits to the customers. Growing customers and improving monetization leads to strong revenue growth, and we expect the online TurboTax and QuickBooks businesses to be the primary drivers going forward. Over the next 3 years, we expect more than 2/3 of our revenue to come from QBO and TurboTax Online, with QBO delivering much of that growth. Our desktop offerings continue to be profitable, and that allows us to invest in new products and new markets around the world. After a decade of economic expansion, a number of you have asked us how will Intuit perform during a recession. The short answer is that we're pretty resilient.
Our solutions are more important than ever in tough times. We help our customers survive in these environments. People often start businesses when companies have layoffs, and that presents a real opportunity in QuickBooks. Keep in mind that in 2009, it really hit small businesses even harder than other recessions, because it was pretty much impossible to get a loan. However, our revenue still grew during that period compared to declines for many other companies. Of course, consumers still have to file taxes even during a recession. Most importantly, we have a track record of helping our customers prosper in difficult times. In fact, it's often an opportunity for us to really lean in and build loyalty with our base, so that everyone emerges on the other side stronger and more successful.
For example, during the last downturn, we dropped our prices on QuickBooks to really show our commitment to helping our customers through the tough times. With products that customers need in all economic environments, and a significant portion of current period revenue coming from existing customers, we've got a highly predictable revenue model. We expect about 75% of revenue this year to come from customers who are already on board or who are expected to return based on past behavior. Our highly predictable revenue model and a disciplined and long-term investment philosophy enables us to continue producing a strong financial profile. Walking down the P&L, gross margin has been stable, about 84%, and we expect that to continue. Many of you have asked about the impact to our gross margin from moving to the cloud.
We do expect some savings, but we actually made the move to accelerate our innovation cycle. In addition, our business is growing, so we're investing in digital COGS and reserved instances in place of capital expenditures. As for sales and marketing, it continues to be an area we're investing in, which we believe is important to build our brand and drive our business, especially as we enter new geographies. Our LTV to CAC targets provide the guardrails for our investments in small business, and our consumer team actually tends to focus more on a one-year payback. As for R&D, we benchmark our spending across our tech peers to make sure that we've got the right amount of investment and invention. Innovation, excuse me.
You heard Tayloe talk earlier about the investments we've made in productivity tools and services, and that investment is helping us to drive our strategy forward with speed. We continue to see an opportunity in G&A. We really want to continue to look at generating some leverage there, and we're working hard to make sure that we're best in class. We manage the business with a focus on freeing up money that can be reinvested in the places that matter most. This is key for us for making sure we can continually reinvent ourselves and deliver the best products and experiences for our customers. What do these investment opportunities look like?
Last year, we spoke about our investments in four key areas to help accelerate progress in the business. This approach was successful in driving a strong year while simultaneously establishing the right building blocks for durable growth. We freed up nearly $200 million that we reinvested into priority areas. Allocating dollars to the best investment opportunities is really a part of who we are. It's part of our DNA. Going forward, we'll target high-yield opportunities that drive durable growth and accelerate our speed, all within the context of our financial principles. Looking to fiscal 2019, examples on the slide include investments in first time use, AI/ML, migration to the cloud, TurboTax Live, and expanding our QBO customer base with products like QBO Advanced. These types of investments build the path for us to achieve the sustained double-digit revenue growth we're targeting.
It's important for us to continue to be effective stewards of capital as we've been in the past. Looking back over the last four years, we've returned $6 billion of free cash flow to shareholders through share repurchase and dividends. We bought back fewer shares this last year than we typically have, in part due to an uptick in M&A. However, share repurchases are still an important tool to return capital that can't be invested profitably in the business. I'll talk more about that in just a second. As for dividends, our board declared a 21% increase in our dividend for fiscal year 2019. One thing I will draw your attention to here is CapEx. We've seen CapEx as a % of revenue fluctuate over the last few years a bit during our transition to AWS.
Going forward, we would expect it to be around the 2%-3% of revenue range. Now, our philosophy and principles on share repurchases have not changed, this slide should look very familiar to you. That said, I just wanted to remind you of how we actually manage that program. We limit repurchases to cash in excess of what we need to run the business and to make prudent acquisitions. At a minimum, we expect to offset dilution over a three-year period and to be in the market each quarter. Now, taking into consideration the market opportunity and our financial principles, we're pleased to be guiding double-digit revenue growth for both small business and consumer segments at the high end of the range. Now, this is the guidance that we released back in August, there are no changes here.
We're excited that we exited the year with strength across all of our businesses. We expect this momentum to continue as we make our way through fiscal 2019. This is our guidance for operating income and EPS. No changes here either. We're excited about the plan we have for this year. You'll also remember at our last earnings call, the move to 606 has had an impact on our margins this year. You can see that that's reflected here. If you do have any questions about this, you can take a look at the materials that we published back in August, reach out to anyone on our investor relations team, we'll be more than happy to help you. In summary, we're confident about the business as we continue to see opportunities to drive durable growth.
We're focused on both the short term and the long term, we're continuing to build and invest to deliver for customers. Our One Intuit ecosystem strategy is positioning us well as we look ahead, we'll continue to use our financial principles to guide our decisions. We look forward to reviewing our results as we move through the year. Thank you. Now I'd like to welcome Brad Smith back to the stage.
All right. As Michelle said, we hit you with a lot of material, a lot of facts per second. That's sort of the Intuit way. We always ask for feedback after these sessions, any feedback you have on how we can make this a more useful and productive use of your time would be fantastic. If I had to summarize before I open it up for questions, I hope there's two things that you took away from today. The first is, one of the hardest things to do is become the version that you aspire to be without losing who you are in the process.
Today, what I thought the team did a nice job of articulating is we've gone back to the core of who we've been for 35 years, we brought those lessons and those techniques forward so that every generation today understands what the generations before us did. We leaned into the future. We're 12 months into a new strategy to unlock the power of many for the prosperity of one, we have reasons to believe. Which takes me to my second point. One of the things that we're proud of inside the company is we're willing to transparently share where we're doing well and where we're not, what the opportunities are if we simply get out of our own way. What we hope to share today is evidence and reasons to believe.
Today, we challenged all of ourselves as presenters to say, "Because of this, you can expect that." There wasn't a single articulation today of anything that we pointed to that we don't already have end market evidence that we're able to deliver. Those two things, I hope, are the summation of what you walk out today. We are in the next chapter of what we think is a multi-year chapter of growth, we have proven reasons to believe and an incredible team prepared to deliver it. With that being said, I would love to open it up to take any questions that you would like to talk about. We will get microphones to you, so whoever has the mic may start speaking.
Thanks, Brad. Nice work today. It is Scott Schneeberger with Oppenheimer. Two years ago this investor day, you had forecast consumer tax returns growing by a third. That is about a 9% CAGR. The volume has been significantly lower. That is not a slight because you have had tremendous revenue per return growth in the past two years. I am curious, what is the outlook for the volume growth in the consumer group of 8%-12% revenue? Where does volume fit in for tax returns?
Yeah. If you go back to the four key levers that drive growth in tax, the first is total number of returns being filed with the IRS, and we think that is going to be in a 0-1% range. You saw a 10-year look back, it has been about six tenths of a point. The second is DIY category growth. You saw what the historical category growth has been for all the methods. CPAs are up 0.3, stores are down 2.9, TurboTax up 6.3, the rest of the digital up 1.9. When you look at that, it is probably in the 3-5% range is sort of where we think digital category growth is. Then you look at us taking share. Our goal, as Greg Johnson said, is to continue to take share.
A point of share, more than a point of share if we can. Then the last is revenue per return. When you put that all together, I would start to expect right now to see that sort of mid-single digit sort of customer growth. That could, as we accelerate our ability to show that we can get more first-time filers and more people out of assisted, will continue to accelerate over time. Today, I think that is all that is necessary for us to continue to deliver that 8%-12% growth that we just upleveled for the long term. I think that is the moderation you look at.
What that is growing faster than the category, which by the way, is growing faster than everything else. Then us picking up a little bit of share. It gives us a little top spin on overall category growth. That would be the numbers that I would consider.
Thanks. If I could just sneak in a quick follow-up on that. In TurboTax Live this last year, you just mentioned you had great acquisition of first-time filers, but you have the 3 million that had dropped, that you mentioned going into this year. Could you please address what you saw in that?
We can. What Scott's referring to, you may recall, is we had two hypotheses going into this year with TurboTax Live. One is we lose about 7 million customers out of our own base of TurboTax every year. 3 million of them are because they lost confidence. They had a change in their personal life. Their child graduated college. Can I still deduct her in my taxes? On and on. One of the hypotheses was, could we actually increase retention of our own customers by improving the confidence that they have in themselves? The second was, could we get more people out of tax stores? What we did prove this year with TurboTax Live, Greg went through this and some of the numbers, is we increased the retention 200 basis points. Yes, we did stem the tide of some of those who were moving to assisted.
The other thing we proved is we were able to get a 10-point lift on people out of stores with TurboTax Live versus what we get with core Turbo. The surprise, as Scott teaches us, savor the surprise. What we didn't expect is a greater mix of first-time filers. Filing for the first time out of college or maybe now separately filing versus their spouse. Those three things give us a reason to believe that we have a real opportunity for real growth as we go forward. We did improve retention 200 basis points. Okay, whoever has the microphone, because it'll be hard for me to point. I'll ask the microphone runners just to get it to someone so no one's offended.
Thanks, Brad. Walter, go ahead.
Because I don't want to pick my favorites out of all my favorites.
Question for you or maybe Greg. On the trade down potential or the regulatory change, is there any precedent you might point to or examples in your past dealing with the free filers? I know a couple years ago, free filers caused you some challenges and you overcame those. Maybe something you could give us a little more detail into what drives your comfort that you can get through whatever trade down might happen.
Yes, I really appreciate you asking that question because I know that's one of the questions out there in the market today with tax simplification. I thought Greg did a masterful job of describing simplification drives category growth. One point of category growth is worth several points of revenue growth for TurboTax. Yes, there is a reality that there could be a downshift with more people qualifying for deductions. Keep in mind, there are 84 million people north of us in the assisted category that are also going to shift down. Then there's some portion in our own base that we're going to have to do what Greg said, demonstrate that we have reasons to believe that they may want to aspire for a product beyond just going down to free. What is a use case?
A use case would be in 2004, the category had a new commercial player who entered with free. We faced a prisoner's dilemma. Do we try to protect the margin, or do we do what we've always been taught, which is disrupt ourselves? We decided to go free. The thesis at that time was we will have now taken the category down to zero. In that year, we made $29 a return, and we had a 59% margin in the business. Now, fast-forward, free is now the only thing you hear on TV between now and April. Every commercial player out there does it. This year, we made $58 a return and mid 60% margin.
We know how to innovate and create value, as Greg suggested, so that people who may qualify for something can find other things that they're willing to come in and use and potentially pay for. That's probably the best use case of all. Simplification will drive people into the category. There are a lot of people north of us that are going to come into the category with simplification, and then our job is to show we can demonstrate real value they're willing to pay for, and the going to free was the best case I can give you. We doubled revenue per return and increased margin in the process. Okay, over here.
Hey, Brad. Yeah, thanks. Matt Pfau with William Blair. Just wanted to follow up on that a little and some of the comments about getting some of the free filers to potentially trade up. Historically, you've charged for the solution based on what type of return or what type of schedule you're filing. With the exception of TurboTax Live, it's mostly been based on complexity of the return. How do you get customers to trade up if their return is going to be simple or qualify for free? Does that involve perhaps changing the pricing and pricing for functionality versus just pricing based on the complexity of somebody's return?
It's a wonderful question, this year, there will be a complete reset in the industry. What you will see happening as a result of the IRS tax simplification Instead of having all these different forms, you now have one form with six schedules. Complexity-based lineups, which historically have been the way the market has gone, will shift. We aren't prepared today, and we don't want to, for the obvious reasons, announce what our product lineup will be. You should know our team has been hard at work and partnering with the IRS over this period of time, and we will have a game plan to do that. If I give you an example of what that might look like, Greg shared one of the big learnings we got is we had made an assumption that people who wanted TurboTax Live were complex filers.
What he came back and discovered, and what we discovered, is the simplest of filers have a need for extra confidence and advice, just like the more complex filers. You can go to turbotax.com right now, and we're running experiments. One of the experiments you will see is TurboTax Live is now available for free customers, all the way up to those who may be buying the higher-end lineup. That is an example of how someone may choose to get more value and be willing to pay for it. Yes?
Hey, Brad. It is Brent Thill with Jefferies. Many of us that have covered you for a while have not seen a product cycle that compelling in TurboTax Live and curious if you think we are correct in that assumption. When you think about the playbook going in, I do not think you really marketed this solution. If you could just talk a little bit about how your playbook shifts without giving us all the secrets of what is going in.
Yeah. I will start with the second part first. We had several learnings. Greg emphasized we take pride in execution. We also take pride in admitting when we did not get it right because it gives us a rallying cry to go after it bigger and better next time. This year, as you saw and you watched our advertising and you saw when TurboTax Live really started to become a little more prominent, it was not really in the advertising at all. In fact, it was in a there is-nothing-to-be-afraid-of campaign, and then there was a little screenshot at the end as a ghost came in the attic that said, "TurboTax Live." We really were not even creating the category or helping people understand there is something fundamentally different.
The other thing is, because we had assumed it would be the back half of tax season when more complex filers come in, we really were not even hitting the message in the early part. I think you will hear a more holistic go-to-market campaign this year without giving up much more than that says a lot of people need Live, not just those people on the back end and not just the most complex filers. The second is, how big is it? We can talk about TAM, $20 billion TAM. We can talk about 84 million people above us. We can talk about the fact we lose 3 million a year to that group, or that there is 10 million that switch inside that group. I would step back and say this is the big aha for me, being in the company for 16 years.
We have always talked about this as do it yourself or get assistance. It was an or. TurboTax Live just showed the world there is an and. You do not have to make a choice. You can be at home in your pajamas using the software, and if you need an expert, you can press a button, at a touch of a screen they come in, they do not see you see them, and they show you where to find it in the product, and at the same time, giving you the confidence that you need. I think this is, quite frankly, the next definition of what tax will look like. We are far ahead with technology that is patented and a network of pros that are willing to come in.
I'm sorry to sound overly bullish, but I can tell you that this is one of the more exciting things I've seen in my time here.
Just a quick follow-up. Neil Williams had mentioned in the past there was really no ceiling on margin, but you've been trapped for 4 years, assuming Michelle's guidance, between 33% and 34% for 4 years in a row.
Yeah.
When you think about just the long term, I know you're not giving guide on long term, but is there anything, would you hold that statement that Neil made in the past, that there really is no ceiling? You could march to a lookalike of Adobe putting up 40% margins.
I really appreciate you asking that question, and I want to start with just the way you asked it. We haven't been trapped. We've made a choice. We saw a fundamental opportunity to refresh our technology, to lean into the public cloud, to advance and hire data scientists, 62% more than we had, and to really get this company set up for the next chapter of success. We have made those investments. Then what we did is what Michelle just walked through. We committed ourselves to, we believe we can grow this company double digits organically, which we've done for several years now. We will grow our revenue faster than our expense, whether the sun is out or there's a recession, and that will give margin leverage and operating leverage. We do not see a ceiling.
I've often said, having the chance to be the fifth in this seat over 35 years, everyone before me, including me and Neil, used to predict what the number was, and every one of us were wrong. We have natural economies of scale, and now when you move to the public cloud and you have the ability to not have to have the data centers and the infrastructure, but actually order the instances on demand, we have a lot more opportunity to be efficient. We also want to keep in mind that we're trying to build the company for the next 35 years. In any given year, we may make a choice, and we will come out and tell you we're making the choice. The answer is, there is no ceiling on the margin expansion.
It's just a choice of what we think is the right balance between short and long, and we will always talk to you about that.
Hi, it's Jennifer Lowe from UBS.
Oh, hey, Jen. I recognized the voice, but I couldn't see where it was coming from.
You know, it's easy to find me in the crowd, I think.
Yeah.
There's not a lot of blonde women. Me and Michelle. In your opening remarks and where you talked about things that went well and maybe could have been opportunities that you didn't execute on as well as you would have liked in 2018, you talked about customer delight, and we talked a lot about the first use experience and opportunities for improvement there. There's also a line in there about reimagining customer care that didn't get as much discussion in your remarks. I know in later presentations, there was discussions around retention rate, and we saw some of the self-help capabilities. I wasn't sure if that's what you meant there or if there were other areas that you thought there could be improvement. Can you just talk about that a little bit and how you envision that playing out?
Jen, I'm glad you really pointed that out because that's something that I'm not sure that we actually extrapolated out today, but it is a big driver. Mark Notarainni, sitting over there next to Lowell. Could you raise your hand, Mark? Is our customer success officer, and he came out of TurboTax and was the father of TurboTax Live. Why I share that is because for years, we have had a break-fix model. We have something that doesn't quite work the way the customer expected, or perhaps we didn't quite have it as smooth as it could be, and they phone someone for help. Now, the process they go through is they first expect no problems to have occurred and no confusion to have occurred. That's our bar. If there is one, the first thing they do is they look in the product for help.
If they can't find answers, especially the personalized answers, like Greg said, we're now starting to deliver, then they go to the website, and they ask others, "There's got to be an answer out there in Google or something." Then if they end up really frustrated, they will call someone in our customer care center, and at that point, they're usually a minus 40 Net Promoter, and our agents do everything with love that they can to get them back to zero. Customer success is get out of that model. Design the quality in, take on the first use, make self-help deeply personalized, and make the human being at the touch of a screen able to come into that experience, not just TurboTax. Now imagine that for QuickBooks.
ProAdvisors working with QuickBooks or any other service we have, a financial advisor potentially down the road with Turbo customers, and have the ability of a human or deeply machine-driven, personalized self-help experiences that help you proactively answer the questions as opposed to you coming in after you're frustrated. Customer success is really more of a proactive, preventative advice-giving as opposed to sitting here and answering questions and helping you dig out of a hole. We've got the foundation in place with TurboTax Live. We already have efforts underway to say, "How do we bring this across the entire company?" That's customer success. Go ahead, Jen. You get a sack of them.
I've got the mic. I've been taking a minute.
All right. That's the most important part.
Just one more if I can stuff it in.
Sure.
I think the booth and the presentations did a great job pulling together the pieces of the connectivity between consumers and the small business segment. That makes a lot of sense in the U.S., where you have a very broad product portfolio and probably the big growth opportunities, adding users, but also improving monetization. In international, you don't have as broad a product portfolio currently. You don't have the consumer tax business outside of U.S. and Canada. Should we envision that type of playbook being applicable in the international markets as well? Or is it going to be more two separate playbooks, one U.S. and Canada, which is more about that connectivity story, and then more of a land grab type story in international?
Right. Jen, there's a two-part answer. There's at today and an opportunity in the future. I'll start with today. We made a decision in 2012 to become an open platform, to have our data and our customers work with our own stuff, as well as others in the market. Those others in the market, by the way, may be in the same space we are. We are proud to be partners with Square and with PayPal and with ADP, and you name it. In those international markets, many of those players are there. If we don't have a fully built-out solution yet, we are more than happy to have our customers connect with those other apps to help them be successful. There's benefit in that ecosystem for us. It increases the stickiness of QBO.
Their data flows into our data lake, our engineers go to work, and we're able to do other things. There's a real benefit for that, for the partner and for us. The second is tax itself, TurboTax Self-Employed. Greg showed the solar system, the five rings, that fifth ring being we're now in the U.S. and Canada.
Tayloe described we're rewriting that technology and showed the multiple chapters of a now AI-driven tax engine that is more rules-based instead of procedural-based, which is what it used to be, which means we can lift and shift into other countries once that is done, and we're going to have that journey over the next couple of years, and then we'll be running experiments to say, "Can we take the rest of the Intuit ecosystem into other countries?" If we choose not to do that, the good news is our ecosystem will work with the accountants in those countries or anybody else, and the customer still wins. Great. Okay, over here on this side. Jennifer McDonald.
Hey, Brad. Well, thanks for all your hard work over the years, and good to be with you. Good luck in the future. Question on personal finance. How do we think about that in terms of the impact it could have on your results now and then how you view it into the future?
Personal finance is one of those come full circle things. That was the original idea and the thought that Scott and Tom Proulx and the generations before us sat out and said, "Wow, there's got to be a better way to help people have a more fulfilling life and financially rewarding life." We've learned a lot over the years, and some things have worked and some things haven't. Now with this next chapter, and with all the things we shared with you today, we think we have a chance to come back in a much more profound way and have a greater impact. With that said, we are in an early chapter, so it may be a 35-year theme, but we're 12 months in to Turbo and rethinking Mint.
In terms of any materiality, we have not baked anything into our forecast right now other than experiments and rapid learning. What you will see over time is that as we continue to have reasons to believe, we will come here next year and say, "Because of this, we now believe this," and that will show up in forecasts. Right now, know that we're committed. We've fallen in love with the problem. In fact, we've been in love with this problem for 35 years. We think we have a better how now, and as we start to get evidence that how is going to build durable advantage, we'll build that into our forecast. Another one over here. Thank you.
Hey, Ryan Kalender from Barclays.
Hi.
Quick question for you as you're kind of leaving. If you look at the opportunity set at the moment, it's kind of the best I've seen for years. You can go on TurboTax Live , there's a massive upside. On the QuickBooks side, you have international, you also go to Advanced, yeah, there's a big market over there. You have personal finance. There's so many different areas. What's your advice, or how would you think about resource allocation and kind of, there's a lot of different battles, all of them are very important and could be very, very big for you. The risk is also, like you kind of get muddled in all of them, and nothing really works kind of properly. How do you handle that?
Yeah.
What's the advice for Sasan?
You touched on that really well. First of all, you have to have confidence in the leaders, all the leaders you've seen up here on the stage have run different parts of this company and have been in this company for years, and they're steeped in the methodology. We have a premise. Do not rely on PowerPoints, position, persuasion, or politics. It doesn't matter who has the most stripes on their arm. It doesn't matter whose PowerPoint's the prettiest. We want to see evidence. We want to see experiments. We want to see results. Because of this, we can bank on that because that de-risks our decisions and creates upside. We make portfolio bets and investments based upon that.
The answer to your question is right now, we do have a really good, robust set of opportunities, but the ones that we will pursue the most and with the greatest vigor will be the ones that actually have reasons to believe and demonstrated proof that we can actually get a real return on that investment. Right now, we tried to showcase the ones we're most excited about, and we tried to handicap or caveat the ones that are still early days. DIY tax, we're all in. TurboTax Live, absolutely. QuickBooks Core plus international, plus going up to the enterprise because we already have it in desktop, we can go there. We have lots of other markers down, like Turbo and the consumer space and those things. I think those are the ones you hear the most energy on because we have reasons to believe.
The best way to kind of answer the question is to flip back through the presentation and see the size of the evidence today, that's where you should see us doubling down as we go forward. I'll come back over here.
Thank you. Dimitri from Atlantic Equities. You've talked a lot about artificial intelligence and how effective it is at giving the right answer and personalized answer. I guess one of the issue with tax is that sometimes people are just worried, so they need to be reassured even if you give them the right answer. Just wondering if you could share a little bit more feedback in terms of initial reaction from your customers and if there's anything you can do to sort of break down that barrier and basically reassure them if maybe it's to use more voice recognition or any other technology. Thank you.
You put your finger on it, I'm going to borrow from Ginni Rometty, who at IBM coined this phrase. He who steals from me steals twice. I've never had an original idea. I would prefer to refer to this as augmented intelligence, not artificial intelligence. There's a lot technology will do for you, it won't always resolve that self-doubt or that lack of confidence, that's where human expertise comes in and complements the technology. That's why I love things like TurboTax Live, because where you see the artificial intelligence machine learning kicking in, it's just going to personalize those self-help answers inside the product. If you still don't have the confidence, it's going to match you with the right pro. We'll get that whole matchmaking thing out of the way.
It's going to be a human being with empathy and care that's going to help you get to the place you want. In the process, they're going to draw circles on their screen that'll create circles on your screen and kind of teach you. Hopefully, you'll come out of that, not only with having been benefited by artificial intelligence, but with a human being who taught you in the process. I think it's the combination and the intersection of two. That's why when we talk about indispensable connections, it's between technology and products, it's also between people. We think it takes both for this to really come to life. There are techniques we're working on, conversational user interfaces, kind of personalize and humanize technology a little bit more. That's one way that we're going after it.
I think at the end of the day, there will always be a human being behind that click, and that's the magic that we think we're going to bet on. Okay, we can come over here.
Brad, when you gave your long-term tax guidance of 8%-12%?
Did you like that, Kartik?
I did. I did. Better than I expected. How much of that is related to the tax simplification? I listened to Greg's presentation, your comments, Michelle's comments. You're all very, very excited about TurboTax Live, very excited about tax simplification. How much of that played a role in that guidance? Is it that instead of 10, it's 12 now because of that?
If you go back and you look in the presentation, there were the four drivers that I went through a few minutes ago, and what you'll see really jump out now is revenue per return has a higher yield than it historically did. We used to expect about one point from that. It's now up to like three points, and that's because of the mix shift, the TurboTax Self-Employed, the TurboTax Live, the things that Greg talked about, where we're creating more value and still disrupting those people north of us who are charging even more for those kinds of services. That's sort of the short answer. If you look at it more durably, there are three questions that people have about can you really get there in tax?
The first is: Is this tax reform and policy change going to be a headwind or a tailwind? I would point back to evidence again. Because of the last 10 years where you've seen the do-it-yourself category and you've seen TurboTax grow faster than the industry and any other alternative, and during that time, there have been policy changes. Affordable Care Act, the PATH Act with earned income tax credit not getting refunds till February 15th. Through all those policy changes, it has not shifted customer behavior. They're leaning towards digital. Right off the bat, there's a secular trend that we would say policy has not been able to negate. The second is simplification, as Greg said, is actually a catalyst, not a headwind. The question is: Are you going to have a trade-down risk?
We believe the 84 million will come down, and we believe we've demonstrated with the free example that we can actually create value customers will pay for. The third question that we have at the end of the day is, are we able to put together the things that we're doing with TurboTax Live and do-it-yourself to create something no one else has? Those are what goes into the 8 to 12 as we fundamentally think we have a historical reason to believe that the category is advantaged. The second is there will be a policy change that could cause a downshift that we think will be a powerful catalyst for us, and the third is we think we have innovation no one else can match.
It's those things that have led to the 8 to 12, and the biggest lever you see in the next year is that revenue per return. Thank you. Yes. Hey, Ross.
Hey, Brad. Ross MacMillan from RBC. It's a question that comes back to margin, and when I look at that slide on ARPC across the product portfolio, it's clear that we're pivoting up relative to where we had been, and that's both on the consumer side of the business as well as the small business side of the business. When we think about margins in that context, one would think that margins should gravitate up. If they're not doing that, is it because you're leaning in to customer acquisition? Or what is that dynamic that stops the margin going up when revenue per customers is, I think, on a blended basis, going to be going higher?
Yes. You answered the question. It's an investment choice, Michelle laid out the five areas that we're leaning into this year, while still adhering to our principles of revenue faster than expense, which gives us operating income dollars faster than revenue. If you looked at the ASC 605 guidance before ASC 606 and all the wooden nickels move, it was 10%-12% revenue, 11%-13% operating income dollars. That is margin expansion. Where we are investing, even with that, is we're investing in that first use. I love the analogy, someone said, fish in our backyard. Our customers aren't coming to turbotax.com and QuickBooks to watch animal videos. These aren't exciting categories. They're there to solve a real problem, and we're not translating that into business. First use is an investment priority for us across all the businesses.
The second opportunity for us is to make sure that we continue to lean into artificial intelligence and machine learning and get into the public cloud. All of our customer-facing apps will be in that public cloud, as Tayloe talked about, but we still have infrastructure. We still have all of our own apps that we use for our employees we've got to get into the cloud. Those last two opportunities are TurboTax Live and building an enterprise version in the cloud for QuickBooks called QuickBooks Online Advanced. Those are investments. Those are investment decisions. We're doing that while still getting operating leverage, but those are choices that if we chose not to do, we could get faster expansion quickly, but I think we would shortchange the company's long-term growth rate. We make those decisions and trade-offs.
That's great. Just to follow up, on consumer tax for next year, I get the simplification argument, and there's going to be a lot more filers that are going to go from itemized deductions to a simple file.
Yes.
They might not know that going into the season.
Right.
How do you get confident that this isn't something that has maybe a bigger impact in the out year when people have gone through one cycle?
Right. Well, I hope what you got out of our conversation today and also out of working with us over the years is we really have a gestalt, which is we want to help the overlooked and the underserved. I mean, to have a mission of powering prosperity, which is akin to eliminate poverty and increase the odds of success for small business, we don't want this to be a customer didn't know, therefore don't tell them. We actually want those who qualify for standard deduction to know that they qualify for standard deduction with no bait and switch. Then we want to demonstrate to them, by the way, if you aren't quite sure, here's some other things that you can come into, and we think that's what builds it durably and sustainably.
Ultimately, all you have to do is look past tax simplification at the last 10 years, you can go past 10. We just decided to do 10 because the slide gets too hard to read. You can go back to as long as the IRS has been reporting, there has been a shift towards do it yourself. Just as the generations grew up googling everything, using their smartphones, saying, "There's got to be a better way," they don't play phonographs now, although there was a quick comeback on phonographs two years ago, now it's back. So that's the natural thing that's going to continue to power that growth. I think tax simplification for us is going to be a catalyst.
We're going to make sure customers know what they're qualified for, we're going to try to solve other problems for them that they're willing to pay for. I don't think it's a short-term sugar high. I think it's sustainable. Up here in the front. Somebody have a microphone here? I'm sorry. You got the mic, and then I'll come to you next.
Thanks, Brad. Greg touched on building out a consumer finance platform. I guess first question, how quickly do you think you'll push beyond the walls of TurboTax, and how does that potentially change the go-to-market? Kind of as a follow-on, how should we think about the potential of the consumer finance platform as being a new channel for TurboTax?
We are outside the walls of TurboTax today. We have a wonderful product called Mint that over the years we have continued to grow and cultivate. We've tried some different things along the way, embedding bill pay service and other things in there. I think with the work of Turbo, we've come full circle to what is the most important problem that Mint solves, what is a whole new channel of potential consumers that could come into a product like Turbo. We thought at one point that it could be an either/or it could be an and, right now we think that both are solving different problems. The net-net is Mint's got an outside the walls opportunity today.
Turbo has an inside the walls in TurboTax, together, we're knitting together a personal finance strategy that we're still just early days in to say, how does this fit together in something bigger and more meaningful than what it is today? We don't, at this point, have anything else to share beyond the fact that we do have 25 million people between Mint and TurboTax, or Mint and Turbo, who consented to share their data. They're getting a free app. They're getting savings. [inaudible] because all customers share two things in common, money in and money out, which we happen to call accounting. Let's open up that platform and allow customers to work with any of those apps, and that gave us the first leg of growth.
The second thing we discovered is there are these mega platforms and mega partners, whether they are Chase or they are Facebook and Google, or they are PayPal and others that serve tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of customers, and their customers have the same problems as our customers. We began to form these relationships with them, where we are creating real wins between both of us and the customers winning in the process.
I feel like that opportunity is the opportunity that the last 12 months we have demonstrated we can go beyond an independent third-party software developer with us, and we can do that and these bigger players, whether it is Walmart or others, where we can help them solve a problem for their customer they could not do on their own, and they in turn are going to help us solve a problem or bring us customers we could not have gotten to on our own, and together we are all going to win. That is the big unlock in this next chapter.
Can you quantify, I guess, last year, how many customers in aggregate, either through QuickBooks or TurboTax, came from Chase or Walmart or these other channels?
Two part answer. You should know that we know that number, but we are not sharing that number. It is not because we do not love you all, it is that right now, competitively, we think we are onto something that we want to make sure we can build durable enough and at a large enough scale that it will become meaningful and hard for someone to replicate. Yes, we are tracking that. I think Michelle talked about when we talked about what will drive confidence in shareholders, and one of them is not only the customer growth but in the number of interactions and connections happening in our ecosystem. That is something we have added to our model in the last year and a half, and we are really tracking that with a lot of rigor.
Brad Reback from Stifel.
Yeah.
At what point do you have to get to get confidence to begin to monetize the platform directly as opposed, we'll say, the indirect monetization you get today via better retention?
It's a great question, and it comes back to the data stewardship principles that Tayloe reminded us of, that we had put in place back in the early part of this decade, which is we believe it's the customer's data, not ours. We will never use their data without their consent. We will never use their data unless it benefits them directly, and we will never sell their data. Right now, our customers have consented 95, 96.5% in TurboTax and Turbo to say, "Yeah, go get me lower interest rates. Go get me a pre-qualified loan. Go help me pre-fill half of this application. I'm all in." In that situation, we can monetize that in an indirect way with a partner.
Today, we have not come up with a way that we think honors our data stewardship principles and/or benefits the customer in a way where we would go do anything other than that. As long as we can find a way to create value for the customer that they agree to, that we can get paid some other way, we're going to pursue that avenue. Directly monetizing the platform, charging someone for a connection to get the data, that's not the game that we think makes sense at this point in time. Yes? Coming right behind you. Well, thank you.
Thank you. Just on TurboTax Live, obviously addressing a big market, you're innovating really fast, assuming competition will start to do something similar over a period of time. In your mind, how do you think competition is going to evolve, and what do you think is a sustainable advantage relative to when the peers catch up on the technology and all that stuff? Where do you see the sustainable advantage?
Yeah. It's a wonderful question, you heard everything from Diego's presentation of a customer-driven innovation models, find a big, important problem that we and our partners can solve well and build durable advantage. I articulated the moats, the competitive moats. The first piece is competition is great. I don't mean that just to throw out a platitude. They continue to raise their game, they raise our game, and collectively, we help small businesses and families understand there's a better idea. You heard the numbers Sasan shared, 35% of small businesses still do payroll with a paper and pencil. It's not a zero-sum game today. The more we all get in, the more we can revolutionize and help these individuals succeed. The question is, who's got a real competitive advantage and a deep moat?
Our strategy is such that we have assets others can't match. Very few companies serve the consumer, the small business, the self-employed, hundreds of thousands of accountants who are willing to be pros in TurboTax Live, already had the connections with the banks from the days of Quicken from years ago. All those assets have rolled up to now, we do 40% of the nation's tax returns. We are the fifth-largest bank when you aggregate all the bank accounts, $2.6 trillion of payments flow through us, 25% of the GDP. We had this huge set of assets that we're starting to say was a latent network, now we're going to unlock it.
Tayloe talked about, in addition to just having those assets that are hard to match unless they go cut deals with everybody, we have patents and technology and a multi-year head start on TurboTax Live that it's incredibly hard to catch up and replicate. We're not taking any of that for granted. We wake up every single morning, we're worried about where the competition is. We seek to understand and learn from them. It used to be called plagiarism, now it's called benchmarking. We're okay taking an idea someone came up with that we think could be a better way of doing it and running fast.
Our sources of durable advantage, to answer your question, are in my presentation, and they really are the platform and the power of the platform, the data, and then our data science that matches up, and then the indispensable connections or network effects we're starting to create between our customers that others can't replicate. I think we are out of time. I'm going to ask if I can bring this to a close just to respect everyone's time, and you should know we have lunch out there, and we are more than happy to take those questions for you that didn't get the chance to ask. I would add a closing thought. I obviously won't be on this stage next year. I want to leave you with two things.
One is when I sat down out of university and asked my mom and dad, "How do I choose a career?" They had simple advice. One was, choose a company with a purpose, with a why, something that makes your heart beat really fast. I can tell you for 16 years, I have been at home. This has been an incredible company that lives its values and cares deeply about its customers, and every day wakes up trying to be a better version of itself. The second thing my parents told me is, surround yourself with people smarter than you so you can learn and grow every day.
From the privilege of working with Scott Cook for 16 years, to learning from Bill Campbell, to working with the team you saw up here, I can guarantee you I have worked with people smarter than me, and they've made me a better version of myself. Last but not least, I really want to thank you. It's been incredible interacting with you, spending time with you, having you sharpen my thinking and sharpen our strategy. It's been a privilege. Thank you very much.