Good morning. Welcome to BB&T's 2018 Investor Day. My name is Richard Baytosh with Investor Relations. Thank you to everyone who made the trip to Greensboro today, and to those on the Webex listening. We're very appreciative that you made the event. Thank you again for all who joined us yesterday for an evening at the Institute. We trust you had an enjoyable time and learned about the mission. Regarding today's schedule, at registration, you received a brochure with the agenda for the day and a description of the exhibits. On your way into the auditorium, you noticed that the exhibits were open. They will be open all day during breaks and during lunch, but not during the presentations. We encourage you to stop by and learn as much as you can about each of these exhibits. Some housekeeping items.
Materials for each presentation will be uploaded to bbt.com shortly before each presenter. There is refreshment set up in the back of the room and also outside for your enjoyment. There's also a device charging station in the back of the room, and as you exit the room, there's one off to the right. We have breaks scheduled throughout the day just shortly before 10:00 A.M. and again at 2:15 P.M. There will be lunch at 11:45 A.M. We have a full schedule today. There will be time for Q&A at the end of the presentations with the entire executive management team. Finally, we have our forward-looking disclosure statement shown on the screen, as well as in Daryl Bible's presentation. The statement covers all presentations and the Q&A session. With great pleasure, let me introduce our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Kelly King.
Perspective is a very interesting concept. I hope that little video gives you just a way to think about your perspective on life. How many times do we get bogged down and focused and concerned about all the challenges and all the issues and all the problems we have and how tough life is for us? Then we get a different perspective, and we realize just how fortunate we are and how blessed we are. We're very blessed, very thankful that you all are here. Thank you very much. Thank you for all of you that came last night. Hope your stay was enjoyable. Thank you, all of you, for joining us on the webcast. We really appreciate you joining us as well. What we tried to share with you last night is that BB&T is a different company. We're a different bank.
We really are focused on trying to make the world a better place to live. We are doing everything we can in that context to execute on our vision and our mission and our values. Those are the three things about BB&T that are non-negotiable, our vision, our mission, and our values. That's important because everything else is negotiable. The world is changing. The world is changing with blinding speed. We talked some about that last night. I'll just reinforce to you that because the world is changing so fast, it is critically important for all that are going to survive and thrive to be willing to change in a course. At BB&T, you're going to hear a lot today about strategies and tactics. Last night, we talked about philosophy. Today, we're going to talk about strategies and tactics.
You're going to hear us talk about disrupt or die. You're going to hear us talk about building the new bank. You're going to hear us talk about pruning the old bank. You'll see the transitional flow of that as we extract expense load from the old bank that is not needed today and invest heavily in the new bank, in digital, in new delivery platforms, in lots of new products and approaches that you're going to hear about. This whole idea is about helping you understand better how we're transitioning from the old bank to the new bank to be positioned for this new world in which we live. It's a very exciting time. You're going to hear us talk about some key concepts.
One of the things that you'll hear about is us working with a number of consultants as we go across the business and reconceptualize and reconstitute our businesses. That's all a part of this "disrupt or die" strategy. There are a couple of pet philosophies that I've had over the years that I hope you will hear threaded through this that I think are pretty powerful. One of those is, it is better to have 100% execution of an 80% idea than a 50% execution of 100% idea. In other words, it doesn't have to be exactly right. It just needs to be really well executed.
John Wooden used to say that to his basketball team every time one of his new superstars would come in with all of his great personal plays and say, "Coach, we got to run my plays." The coach would say, "No, we're going to run these plays." The player would say, "Well, Coach, you've been running these same plays for years, and everybody, when they come to play you, they know what your plays are going to be." He said, "That's right. I'll write it down and give it to them. Here's the reason we're going to win. Because we're going to be better focused, better trained, better shape. We will execute better. We'll win every time, even though they know exactly what our strategies are." BB&T is really focused on good strategies, but we're really focused on good execution.
Another key concept that you'll hear that's threaded through all of these reconceptualization approaches, this is a really important one, and that is every function in the organization should be performed by the person who is the least qualified, who can perform it effectively. Every function in the organization should be performed by the person who is the least qualified, who can perform it effectively. That is the concept of empowerment. If you think about that, by letting the least qualified person do the job versus the most qualified, which is what happens in most companies, you're constantly pushing down empowerment, which means you're constantly growing people. We say at BB&T, everybody in our company has to have a growth mindset.
By having a growth mindset and our commitment to empowerment and pushing down authority and responsibility, we're constantly bringing up people into the organization, and as people below you come up, that allows you to move up, and the whole organization is growing through that process. This is a really powerful idea, and it's one that everybody you're going to hear from is working on, and I think you will find it to be very refreshing and reassuring with regard to BB&T. BB&T is a different kind of company. We're a different kind of bank. We're building the new bank, and we're building it in the context of our philosophy. Before I close and let the program get started, I want to just remind you of one thing I said last night.
This is the day that all of us have to make the world a better place to live. Don't forget the power of one. Power of one is about living every day as if it is what it is, which is the God-given day you have to make a difference in the world. Don't get in the trap of worrying about yesterday. Don't fall in the trap of waiting for tomorrow. You can't change yesterday, and tomorrow is not promised. This is it. This is your day. Treat every person with dignity and respect that they deserve, and realize the reality of life, the essence of life is about the fact that we interact with people, our families, our friends, our coworkers, people we don't even know. We interact with them all the time, and every one of those interactions is an opportunity for us to make a difference.
As you make a difference in those individuals' lives, you make a difference in the world. The butterfly effect can cause things to happen that you will never even be able to imagine and maybe never even know because you took the time, you made the effort to try to make a special, positive, meaningful impact on the lives of those people. Power of one is a really incredibly important concept to keep in mind, and I hope you will do that. Again, thank you all for joining us. We're really excited about today. We'll all be around as we take breaks for questions. You're going to see a dynamic team. I am so proud of each and every one of our team. You're going to see some of us that have been around for a while.
You're going to see a lot of new faces, new folks that are really adding major contributions to our company, and I think you'll enjoy every bit of it. At the very end of the presentation before we go into Q&A this afternoon, which I hope you'll stay for, we are going to hold questions to the end, we'll take all the time you want to cover questions this afternoon. I will tell you at the last presentation, Daryl is going to be providing for you some enhanced and improved long-term performance goals as we've reflected on the recent changes in our environment. We're off to a good day. Let's talk about BB&T building the new bank. Chris?
All right. Good morning. Pleasure to be with you all and give you a strategic overview of the company. When I'm finished, I hope that you will take away four primary messages. One, we operate a differentiated and diversified franchise in great markets. We are, in fact, maintaining our performance advantage long term. We are, as Kelly said, reconceptualizing our business, and we're going to talk a lot about that today. We have a deep and experienced leadership team, and hopefully, you'll get to experience that firsthand. We do operate a differentiated set of businesses that really provide or strive for top-tier performance. Those businesses really come together to produce diversification that offers really stable, consistent, and strong earnings growth. We set some targets over the last several years of cost savings. We have achieved those, and it's through intense focus on expense control.
Expense control is a huge part of disrupt or die. Disrupt or die is really about, as you just heard Kelly say, taking costs out of our existing company, the old company, if you will, to reinvest in and build the new company, all while maintaining a strong focus on the client. You're going to hear that threaded throughout the day. Focus on maintaining a strong discipline credit culture, achieving operating leverage on a consistent basis. At the same time, a strong and consistent dividend with a strong TSR. The driving force behind all this for us is to execute on our vision, mission, and values. You heard a lot about that last night, and that's the underlying support of everything we do. Let's take a look at the franchise. As you know, we operate a community banking model. We've been doing it for about 30 years.
We operate a diversified set of businesses throughout the country on a national basis. The company was founded in 1872, eighth largest deposit institution or financial institution by deposits, fifth largest insurance broker, and we are a broker, no underwriting, but a broker in the U.S. and in the world. Second highest mobile application ranking in the industry. Over 1,900 bank locations and just over 36,000 FTEs serving 7.6 million clients. If you look at our banking franchise, we operate primarily in 15 states. Well, 15 states, primarily in 12 or 13 because we just spilled over into Indiana and Ohio with two to three offices. We have top five market share in the primary operating states, about half of those. If you look at our weighted average GDP growth in our footprint, it really gives you a view inside our markets.
Over three years compared to our peers, our markets have grown second fastest, 3.8% average GDP growth over that period of time. We also are in eight of the top 10 cities for economic opportunity in our banking footprint. This is really the differentiating slide as a part of our strategy and how we run our company. It's really about diversification. You can see on the left our diversification of revenue by segment and leads to the performance differentiation on the right. Far and away, the largest is community bank retail, makes up 44% of revenue, commercial, 23%, financial services, 17%, and insurance holdings, 16%. The most important point is what it does for us on the right side.
In the upper left, you can see our pre-tax, pre-provision net revenue over total assets for 10 years has grown faster than our national peers and our top four banks. We've done it, as you see in the lower right, with less volatility. Faster-growing PPNR, less volatility, really result of running a diversified business, and that is a key strategic difference for us. This takes a look at our business. I'm not going to cover all these, but give you a sort of a quick rundown of what the businesses bring to BB&T. It's important to understand what they do, but it's also more important to understand what they bring us. Insurance Holdings, the largest non-interest income provider we have, provides just under $2 billion in revenue, and it provides a broader product array. It helps differentiate our business and helps us act as a trusted advisor.
Many times, our bankers use this product as the lead product to call on a prospect. It happens every day. The revenue stream is very diversified because it's not sensitive to interest rates, nor is it subject to dynamics of a credit cycle. In a downturn, this business generally stands tall and very helpful. A complementary business to insurance is AFCO/CAFO, which is one of the largest insurance premium finance businesses in the country that we operate. You'll hear John Howard talk more about those two later today. BB&T Securities and that broker deal, we operate really two businesses. BB&T Investment Services, which serves our consumer investment needs for our consumer clients throughout the footprint, and it's primarily annuities and mutual funds. We also operate Scott & Stringfellow, our full-service brokerage business. Interesting, five, six years ago, we were in two or three states.
Today, we're in all of our primary operating states. We've grown this business much faster on purpose to support our growing wealth business. We'll talk more about that in a moment. Scott's actually growing about 15% year to date. If you look at Grandbridge, it's our national commercial real estate and multifamily business that does finance and does it through third-party placements primarily, but also some on-balance sheet financing. What it brings us is really strong fee income through placement in the secondary market and some on-balance sheet net interest income. Rufus Yates will talk to you more about those businesses. Regional Acceptance is our subprime and to a smaller extent, near-prime auto finance business. What it brings us is really strong risk-adjusted deals and a controlled operating structure. Sheffield is a small-ticket equipment finance. You saw a kiosk outside. It does UTVs like you saw there.
It does Jet skis, motorcycles, et cetera. Commercial Equipment Capital provides equipment financing, generally under 250 for small businesses. The point I would make about both Sheffield and CEC is they are national, but they're also point-of-sale businesses. As the consumer demand changes to point-of-sale purchase and finance, we think it provides real good upside in revenue growth. Again, national businesses. Brant will walk you through more detail about that. These are recognitions. I'll just hit a few. 24 Greenwich Excellence Awards in small business and middle market for overall satisfaction, outstanding service. At the bottom, we're real proud of this, named Best for Core Deposit Growth Strategy, the 2018 bank director ranking, and it's a result of growing DDA, and you'll hear more about that today. Dynatrace named us as the second highest mobile app ranking in the industry.
There's a lot on this page, but I think it's an important page. Major accomplishments over the last 4 years since our last Investor Day. Far and away, one of our biggest accomplishments is developing more digital capability, and one of the primary items there is we launched our U by BB&T platform, our digital banking platform. Consistently ranked in the top five in the industry. We've integrated five acquisitions, The Bank of Kentucky, Susquehanna, National Penn, two of our four largest insurance acquisitions, Swett & Crawford in 2016, and Regions Insurance Group, we just converted November 2nd, this month. Really excited to implement Financial Insights, which is an automated platform that does financial analysis for our small business and commercial clients. It really provides two benefits.
One, as our RMs walk through with our commercial clients step by step, the performance of their company versus industry standards, it helps our relationship managers better understand their relationship and can properly offer product sets that are nice solutions for them. It also provides insights to the client at how they might improve their business. Many of them don't have CFOs and financial people, so we are de facto their CFO, and we provide information that shows their performance versus their industry and point out ways they can improve their business and create value that stays with us. David Weaver is going to talk to you more about that. It's about 80% automated. We're going to continue to apply robotics and machine learning to it, and we're going to take it to a fully automated model later on.
As you all know, we spent about $1 billion on three infrastructure projects. A new general ledger, a new commercial loan system, a new data center, state-of-the-art data center we opened last year. We rolled out a new rebranding campaign with a new tagline, All we see is you, and have really stepped up our digital marketing capability, and you'll hear Dontá talk more about that later. One of the best things we've ever done, we continued our Lighthouse Project. Our Lighthouse Project is a community effort where we have actually touched 16.5 million people through the completion of 11,000 projects, and over 640,000 volunteer hours of BB&T associates. We've done it now for 10 years. If you want to learn more about it, we have a kiosk about the Lighthouse Projects outside.
One really big item for us we're really pleased with, we expanded our executive management team. Added five new members in 2016, of which you're going to hear three of them today walk you through their initiatives. Finally, we constructed and launched, opened, I guess you'd say, the BB&T Leadership Institute this July. Many of you got a chance to actually see that tour last night. More important than just the building, it's what it does in order to help us execute our mission with our clients and our associates and our communities. We'll take a quick look at our long-term performance advantage. If you look at adjusted return on average assets, currently we're at 151. We've maintained through the four and three-quarter year review period about a 10 basis point premium on average. Adjusted return on tangible common equity, we're at 20.1%.
We generally have maintained about a 300 basis point premium through the review period. I think there was one quarter we might have been 200. Fee income ratio, 42.2%, generally about 400 basis points favorable to peers. Not the case in 2015 and 2016. You'll recall we sold a company called American Coastal. That was a $140 million revenue company in the middle of 2015, that had an impact on those two years. Our adjusted efficiency ratio, really proud of the improvement we continue to make there. 57.3%, about 170 basis points favorable to peers throughout that review period.
Something you may not focus on, if you were to exclude one of our businesses that is both very unique to BB&T and also very large, our insurance business, for what you might see as more of an apples-to-apples comparison, we're actually operating at 53.1%, which is about 500 basis points favorable to peers through the review period. If you look at risk-adjusted net interest margin, we're at 319, about 23 basis points favorable to peers throughout the review period. Finally, NPAs at 27 basis points and have consistently been at least 10 basis points favorable to peers through that period of time. I want to drill down into how we're executing on Disrupt or Die. You heard Kelly talk about that last night. You heard him cover this slide.
I'm not going to cover this in detail because you've seen it before, I want to make two primary points with you. Yes, we are going through unprecedented change right now with technology, no question about it, if we were in today any one of those prior four stages, we would have said the exact same thing. We're going through unprecedented change. The point is, we had opportunities and took advantage of opportunities in each one of those time periods, we feel the exact same way about the one today. We see it as an opportunity, we're approaching it in that way. The second point I'd make is in 2008, in phase 4, as we were going through the downturn, the leadership team we had in place then, for the most part, is still in place today.
Should we go through a future slowdown, our hope is that would be of benefit to us because we have been through that once before. The core of Disrupt or Die is really about reconceptualizing our business, as I said earlier, to reinvest in or to take cost out of our existing company, or our old company, to reinvest in and build our new company. I'll give you a few examples. If you look at the top left, it's really about optimizing the branch strategy. We took out 148 branches last year. We're going to do 171 this year, 150 or so next year. It's a total of about 20% reduction in our branches over a three-year period. If you look at the upper right, we've also been focusing at the same time on our non-branch facilities.
We've reduced square footage in our non-branches, last year, 7.2%, 4.9% this year, 4.7%, and a little less than 4%, we anticipate next year. We already have a beat on next year. A total of a 16% reduction in square footage in the backroom, which is huge. We anticipate reducing our electricity usage by 20%-25%, and we're going to take a portion of those dollars then and reinvest in the opportunities that you see around that page. One of the primary ones that we've made a lot of impact, as I alluded to earlier, is digital. I mentioned that we were in the top five generally in most all publications and where we're ranked for our U platform. I think it's because we have continued to iterate new enhancements every quarter and to keep it fresh. Last quarter, it was about new card controls.
The quarter before that, it was about a new personal financial management tool for our wealth clients. The objective is to keep it fresh and relevant, and we continue to invest in it. We also began this year, through Dontá's leadership, to roll out something we call Voice of the Client, which is a new digital platform that helps all of our businesses, again, roll out beginning this year all through the end of next. It gives our businesses near real-time client feedback, which helps them better run their business and informs them on what digital investments to make in the future. We also made substantial improvement in our social media messaging and also our digital marketing. We will do over 300 campaigns this year. 95% of those will have a digital component to them, and Dontá will tell you much more about that.
On the lower left, in insurance, we have a number of initiatives underway improving the performance and profitability of insurance. One of the ones that I would point out is robotics. We started six to nine months ago, really digging into how we might improve a real paper-based industry still today. Through that, we have an implementation going in that we expect is going to save us significant $ in 2019. Refocusing on the Community Bank. About a year ago, fourth quarter last year, it became crystal clear to us that we had rich opportunities to really bring value out of the Community Bank. For example, this branch rationalization strategy takes a lot of time. It's really intense. Investing in new branches and growth opportunities, new marketing, be it digital or direct mail, and a vast number of new products that you're going to hear Brant walk you through.
In commercial, where we're standing up the financial insights program, remaking how we deliver small business, real focus behind SBA lending and ABL lending. What we did is we thought it made sense to double down in executive leadership in the Community Bank. We asked Brant Standridge to come in at the beginning of this year to lead the retail segment. We asked David Weaver to continue his focus on leading commercial so that we could get after those initiatives and realize value from them much quicker, and it has worked great so far. Those two fellows work with me to ensure that we still present a unified Community Bank model to our associates, but also how we face the community, and it's gone exceptionally well.
We've been really pleased with the cost that we've been able to take out of the business and improvement in efficiency. Things like we just talked about, the branch rationalization strategy, the non-branch facilities, implementation of robotics, where we're really just in our infancy. We're just getting started. Tremendous opportunity. Last year, we had a system-wide restructure. We took out 1,600 FTEs, about 4% and 4.5% of our workforce. While we have a bias against the use of consultants, we thought in the vein of turning over every rock, because we were darn serious about making this happen, we did decide to bring in outside assistance to help us stand up four new projects, and I'd like to introduce and walk you through those today. The first is technology.
We brought in a consultant to help Barbara and her team really begin to look at the business and technology and how we support the businesses from top to bottom. Started with the organizational review, went through a spans and layers review, reducing layers, increasing spans, taking costs out. We're going to use some of that money to reinvest in. While we're happy with our Agile effort, there's much more we can do with Agile and standing up DevOps to push it throughout the company. Also looking at implementing Lean principles to do what we do more efficiently, and took a hard look at our vendor relationships to take costs out. We are clearly taking costs out in technology, and Barbara will walk you through that transformation, but very, very pleased with what we're doing to align the business to be more business-focused and aligned.
Secondly, John Howard and his team brought in a consultant in April of this year, really the objective was to look at the business from top to bottom, no holds barred. That entailed a review of the operating models from wholesale and retail. It involved looking at the backroom of still a paper-based industry to automate what we can, and I would say that we have automation going in every single entity in some form or fashion in insurance today. Secondly or thirdly, really looking at how the corporation interacts with this large business. If you think about it, insurance is larger in its industry than BB&T is in its industry. How we interact is key so that we allow them to be nimble and flexible to be able to take advantage of opportunities in an entrepreneurial industry.
At the same time, bringing the heft of BB&T to provide shared services where it makes sense, where we have expertise like data and analytics, real estate services, et cetera. The purpose here is to unlock value for the next 2-3 years, and there's never been a time that I have been associated with the insurance business that I feel better about the improved profitability potential we have over the next 2-3 years. John will walk you through his transformation later. Thirdly, beginning in August of this year, we brought in a consultant to help us do a deep dive on organizational simplification projects.
We're starting at the top of the house, layer by layer, going through our management structure, reducing layers, increasing spans of control to design an operating structure that is more efficient and help us make better and faster decisions in this company so that we will be more nimble. It's tough. We're about halfway through it. We'll finish it in the first quarter, but it's absolutely worth it, and it will make us better for having gone through it. Finally, we're redesigning our commercial lending process from end to end. Truly from when we make the first call on the client to when the last loan is paid off at the end of that pay period. The purpose here is really to simplify the process for our associates, our clients, to enhance revenue, and to take out cost.
While all of these have cost implications, about two-thirds of this opportunity, we believe, is revenue as we get our RMs more focused on their targets. This process, we just started in fourth quarter. It will continue through the fourth quarter of next year. You can see four significant, impactful projects we started at the beginning of this year, will roll through the end of next year that will make a significant difference, we believe, in our company, enable us to reinvest more heavily in our company long term. Take a quick look at our leadership team and what you might expect from today. Before I do that, I just want to make a comment. This is a deep and experienced leadership team. We average 54 years age, 27 years with BB&T, and we have five new members that brings in new, fresh ideas.
We've done that over the years. It's a very effective team. For one, I can tell you, having been here 34 years, very proud to work with such a fine group of people. Agenda, I'll leave that for you to peruse. First up is going to be Brant Standridge. Brant is one of our newest members, joined us in 2016. Brant is perfect fit for retail in that he started his career as a market leader, or a branch manager. He then worked his way up to a retail banking manager, running all the branches in a region. He then later ran a large commercial shop. He subsequently went and served as regional president in both Atlanta and Dallas. Comes back to us as a proven leader, very credible with the retail folks because he's been there and done it. They understand that.
Brant is a natural operator, and he's got a lot of very good initiatives in place that he will walk you through to show you how he's, in fact, turning the growth in retail today. You'll enjoy it. Secondly is David Weaver. Dave is also one of our newest leaders, come in in 2016. David spent his entire career in commercial lending, perfect fit for what he does. Grew up as an officer, ran a large commercial shop, then ran the triangle region of North Carolina for us. Later moved into a commercial executive role. He managed a third of the regions in the system before moving into the President of community bank role. David also a perfect fit, a very hands-on leader, really working hard to improve the effectiveness and efficiencies, and he'll walk you through his initiatives and how he's making that happen today as well.
Rufus Yates joined executive management in 2012, leads our financial services segment. You might recall that's the segment that includes large corporate and wealth predominantly, then all the businesses that support those two businesses. Rufus, likewise, a natural fit in that he grew up as a corporate lender, is the principal of our broker-dealer that supports wealth, and he's going to walk you through initiatives to show you why that corporate and wealth will continue to be the growth engine that it has been for our company over the last 7 or 8 years. I think you'll find that to be very interesting as well. John Howard, our Chairman and CEO of Insurance Holdings, came to us through the Crump acquisition in 2012, where he served as CEO and spent most of his career in the insurance industry.
Has been in this role for 3 years and is doing an exceptional job transforming this segment. As I said to you earlier, there hasn't been a time that I feel better about the upside we have in this business from a profitability improvement perspective, and he will walk you through the details of his transformation. Barbara Duck joined executive management in 2003, one of our longest-standing executive management members. She spent time in operations and running production cycles in IT. She stood up our enterprise data office, which she's still responsible for today, and also spent time in digital. Was the perfect choice for CIO in 2016 when we wanted to elevate technology in the company by having it report into executive management.
She will walk you through the transformation she has going on to better situate the company and align to support our business segments for growth as we go forward. Dontá Wilson is our Chief Digital and Client Experience Officer. Dontá also grew up in the community bank, spent time both in retail and commercial, most recently ran our region in Alabama, then very successfully in Atlanta. Dontá has a passion for the client. Has also got the unique ability to reach out and touch large groups of people corporately to move initiatives through, which is why he's cast in his role. You're going to see his passion come through as he really walks you through the digital marketing improvements we've made that's really helped us open online accounts faster today than we ever have.
He'll walk you through the improvements we're making in client service and why, also our digital investments and sort of what to expect going forward. You'll really enjoy hearing from Dontá. You all know Clarke well. Clarke is, I believe, one of, or is the longest running CRO in his respective position in the top 20 banks. His steady hand gets a lot of credit for helping us navigate the downturn as successfully as we did, he will walk you through all the risk initiatives that he has going on and the updates therein. Daryl needs no introduction to this group. Daryl's also the longest running CFO of any of the top 20 banks, and I think one of the most talented balance sheet managers in the country.
Daryl will bring together, after you've heard all the business presentations, all the numbers associated with that to give you an idea of kind of what to expect looking forward. I hope this has given you sort of a quick overview of the company and what to expect today. I'll ask Brant to join us and talk about retail.
Yeah. I tell you every time I see this, I personally think about my own family and the journey that we're on. This is something we're really proud of. It was a partnership between our bank card business and Dante and his marketing team, was intended to be rolled out as a part of our digital platform. We've delivered this through digitally and through social media predominantly, it's had a significant impact. I would just share with you that this ad highlights two things that we're trying to do in our business. The first is that in a world that is obviously evolving quickly from a digital perspective, we have to find unique ways to connect with our clients emotionally. Kelly described it well last night.
The quality quotient is changing, what used to exist in a relationship between a banker and a client inside a branch now exists in many other places, one of those places is digital, we have to use things like this to connect with clients emotionally. The second component that we're working really hard to do, this ad highlights, is to think about what we do and the products that we provide, the services that we provide for the clients in the context of how they fit into the lives of our clients. We think this ad does a good job of highlighting that. I would also just point out that the ad's been quite successful. In fact, this actually came out in early August. It was intended to accompany our rollout of new products in our bank card business.
Since coming out in August, we've actually had over 65 million unique impressions that this has generated. That has driven over 300,000 visits to bbt.com and driven really substantial digital sales associated with our new card rollout, so we're very proud of it. I'm excited about being with you today and really talking around four themes. Kelly talked a lot about our responsibility to disrupt our businesses, to find ways to create differentiation, and specifically in retail, what is a very crowded space. What I want to spend a little time today talking about, in addition to giving you a financial overview, are what are our themes? What are the things that are guiding how we go about that disruption? What are the things that are guiding how we go about creating a differentiated space for BB&T in the marketplace.
The first of those themes is how do we organize? How do we ensure that we're organized appropriately to create the right focus and accountability? The second piece of that we'll spend some time talking about is the client experience. Dontá and I both are going to spend some time talking about the client experience. It's incredibly important. The bar is changing, Kelly described it really well last night, so we want to spend a little bit of time talking about how we're adjusting to that. Thirdly, we'll talk about some low-hanging fruits, some revenue initiatives that exist today. As the world evolves, our ability to generate new revenue opportunities, combined with the fourth theme of how do we optimize the existing business, is what provides us the fuel to be able to invest in the future of the organization.
We'll talk about those things as we go through. Just to level set, Chris has already covered this well, our retail bank and community bank retail and consumer finance businesses comprise 44% of the revenue of the company and 43% of the net income. To give you a little bit further breakdown, there are six business units that comprise our retail community bank and consumer finance segment. The first is obviously the largest, represents half of our revenue, which is what happens in the retail community bank. Chris described it really well.
One of our advantages in going to market in our branch network is the partnership that exists with our community bank approach, where we have all of our lines of business, whether they're commercial or wealth or many of our fee businesses are organized and really unified at the local level to deliver an integrated experience to our clients. Our retail community bank is a big component of that. We also have what we call our card-based services businesses, which comprise of our retail payments operation, our bank card operation, and then we have a fairly significant merchant acquiring business that's a part of that. We also have our mortgage business. Our mortgage business is, from a retail perspective, located inside of BB&T's branch footprint, but we have a mortgage warehouse lending and correspondent lending business that's nationwide.
That's backed up by a fairly large servicing operation. We have our dealer retail services business, which is comprised of all our indirect auto. That includes prime and subprime, and includes a company that we have up in the Northeast called Hahn Financial. Chris mentioned already Sheffield and CEC, and I hope you all will take a moment to peruse our booth for Sheffield. I understand that a little bit later, they're giving rides on the four-wheeler if anyone's interested. This is a very unique business that we have that our clients in this business are first manufacturers.
The recreational vehicle that you actually saw in the lobby was made by a company called BRP, and we have an agreement with BRP in which we finance their product with promotional financing across the country, and Sheffield does that in a number of verticals and has been very successful. Lastly, Commercial Equipment Capital is our small business, small ticket equipment finance business. One point I just want to make, when you think about these, there are a number of our consumer businesses that are actually national in scope, and we think that provides us with a fantastic platform to continue to expand. From a financial perspective, I just wanted to give you a quick overview. First of all, we're pleased with where we see the trends going in our segment.
I would start by saying that we have been through a couple of years of optimizing some lower-yielding portfolios. You all are well aware of that. Given that we're reaching the end of that, and some of the new products that you all are going to hear about and new revenue initiatives you're going to hear about, you begin to see, and you see this in the top left, that production trends are really moving in the right direction. On the other hand, is leading to balances that are now beginning to grow. From a deposit perspective, we're also pleased with where things are going. Now, when you look at the 2018 results, they're year-to-date, and as you all know, there's seasonality in deposits. We're really pleased with how overall deposits are growing, and specifically, we're very pleased in how retail DDA is growing.
That's really the game going forward. You all will see that since 2016, our retail DDA balances have grown at a compounded annual growth rate of 11.1%. Turnaround from a loan portfolio perspective, improving margins with our loan portfolio, increasing deposit margins led by holding our betas low as well as driving more DDA, combined with modest fee income growth, has led to the revenue growth that you ultimately see. You may ask, where is the DDA growth coming from? I would just point you to a statistic that we watch fairly closely, which is the number of net new accounts that we're generating. Dante is going to talk a little bit later about our digital effort. You'll see we have over 3 million clients that are on our digital platform now.
With the work that we're doing from a digital marketing perspective, combined with the performance of our branch network, better attrition results are leading to a massive improvement in what we're seeing from a net new account perspective, and you can relate that to a net new relationship perspective. The group's also doing a good job of managing expenses. You'll see in 2018, our expenses are going to come in lower than 2017, and that is predominantly driven by what's going on with the branch network. We'll talk about that in a moment and the rationalization of that network. That's ultimately leading to positive operating leverage. If you look at 2018, we're headed towards 3-plus % positive operating leverage and very excited about our results. That's a quick overview.
I want to spend the rest of the time and just give you a sense of the road ahead, and how are those themes driving actions within the business. I'll start with our organization. As Chris alluded to earlier, one of the things that we did at the beginning of last year was to organize our retail businesses together, really centered around the client. In my view, this creates a higher level of focus, a higher level of accountability, and frankly, as Chris described it, a lot more capacity to address the evolving needs of our consumer clients. There's tremendous competition in the retail space, and so how are we best positioned to deal with that? In my view, these organizational changes really give us four key opportunities. One, it ensures that the products that we create, the direction that we take, it's consistently focused on the client.
The second piece is, how do we create, amongst all these businesses who touch retail clients, how do we create a consistent experience? Thirdly, how do you take what is a very diverse set of platforms and utilize those platforms to provide a better experience across the board? We'll talk about some of the ways we're doing that. Lastly, this also provides a diverse set of clients, and we have the ability. Some of those are local, some of those are national. How do we leverage that to continue to expand our business? In addition to formal organizational changes, we've also made some informal changes. At the beginning of this year, we set up a group of teams. We organized around six different subjects.
We're calling these teams revenue teams, and each of these teams is comprised of folks from all walks within the organization. It's really everyone in the organization responsible for these efforts, and that includes our compliance partners, our audit partners, our marketing partners, our second-line credit partners. These groups get together once a month with the sole goal of what kind of progress or improvement can we make with either a product, a process, or a policy to deliver better products and services to our clients and do that quicker. One of the things that we know is the world is evolving and changing, and it's doing that quickly, and we have to have the structure necessary to respond.
We believe, as you'll see in a moment, the structure has actually given us an opportunity to roll out products to the client, make changes in processes much faster than we would have been without this structure. The second component I would mention is the effort around our client experience. Dontá is going to spend time talking about this as well, but I just wanted to make a couple of comments on how we think about it. I think Kelly's description last night of the quality and what does quality mean in the retail banking space was exactly right. 15 years ago, it meant the relationship between the banker and the branch and the client that walked in. Today, it's much broader than that. It's what does the experience look like at the ATM? How does it feel in the care center?
More importantly, what can I use your digital platform to be able to do? As we think about the client experience, I can share with you that as an organization, we're collectively working to ensure that in all of these omni-channel points, that we're providing a consistent experience to our client base. Dontá is going to show you some statistics a little bit later that show you the improvement that we continue to make and what clients are saying about the omni-channel experience they have with BB&T. I would also just highlight three examples of where this is taking shape. All three of these examples are digital examples. The first is in our card businesses, in providing our clients additional ability to control their cards, and also providing our clients more interactive fraud alerts.
Obviously, in the space, fraud is a big deal, and it's a big deal to our clients. How can we make that easier for them to access? Then in our subprime auto business, Regional Acceptance, we had the ability through the work of Barbara Duck and her team to provide a payment application. The team actually created this in six months, less than six months, and this has frankly made a big improvement on our borrowers' ability to make their payment. In a business where that is a pretty important component, this has been not only good for our clients but also good for the business. Lastly, I would just mention our online mortgage application process, which is, we think, a fantastic digital experience. In fact, 23% of our new mortgage applications are actually coming through the digital platform.
The businesses, our mortgage businesses partnership with Dontá and also Barbara in our IT group has really allowed us to continue to evolve and improve this platform to drive even more of our mortgage experience through this. Those are three examples of things that we're doing to think about the client experience in a more holistic way. I want to take a moment and also talk about new revenue opportunities because as I said earlier, our ability to generate new incremental revenue opportunities and our ability to prune or optimize the old organization is what leads to our ability to invest in the future of the organization. I just want to mention a few examples of what we're doing to generate new revenue. The first is how do we create more differentiated products?
I mentioned to you earlier the work that our revenue teams are doing, those revenue teams give us the ability to deliver product process faster. These are just some of the examples that products that have either rolled out in the last six months or are rolling out in the next six months that have substantial revenue impact on our retail organization. I'll give you a few examples. We had the ability to work with our deposit products team to create a new savings product that has been very successful since rollout in June. We also had the ability to roll out a small business free checking account, which has been incredibly successful in a short period of time, I'll talk about how that blends with our focus inside of our branches.
I mentioned earlier the new bank card products and our digital ad that accompanied those new products, I would just mention to you that our bank card business, with the help of those new products, new production is up over 40% over last year. Very excited about the progress that is continuing to be made there. I would also just mention quickly, you all may have seen yesterday a press release about our recreational lending business, we're going to begin to take that nationwide. That is not a new business for us. In fact, as you all know, we've been doing that in Sheffield for a number of years. One of the things we have not been doing in Sheffield is focused on the marine business.
As you all may have read, one of the things that's happening in the marine business is that the powersports companies, Polaris and BRP, are making a lot of acquisitions in that space. This is a great chance for us to frankly take a business that we really know well with manufacturers that we know well and expand that into the marine area. That's a significant new revenue opportunity for us. In addition to these new products, we're also investing in products that are already differentiated. In 2009, we launched in earnest what we call our financial wellness program. This is where we go into, and provide financial education and financial wellness to the associates of our employers.
To date, we have 125,000 employers that have allowed the BB&T team to come in and describe and provide financial education, financial wellness, and also discounted banking services to their associates. We continue to enhance, you'll see the timeline of enhancements that have been made. What's most impressive is that program has now generated $6.3 billion in new deposits, 45% of which are DDA. If you look at the chart, you'll also see that the DDA balances since 2014 are growing over 14%. Now, we view this as one of our versions of a virtual bank because this is not a branch-dependent business. We have reps that actually go to the employers. This is a great platform for us to continue to expand, frankly, a great platform for us to expand outside of our branch footprint.
In addition to the work that we're doing in investing in existing products or platforms that are differentiated, we can actually use existing platforms to provide a better experience for our clients. One of the things that we're going to do starting June 12, I'm sorry, February 12, is that our market leaders in the branches, when they have an opportunity to finance a new vehicle, refinance a vehicle, and someone comes into the branch, in the past, we've had a group that has fulfilled all types of loans for our branches. They've approved and fulfilled those loans. Going forward, we're going to leverage the platform we already have in indirect auto. It's more efficient, it's more user-friendly, and it's faster.
We're going to take what has been for our branch associates and for our clients, a day and a half process to close an auto loan, and that now will be a 4-minute process. That's a pretty substantial improvement by leveraging a platform that frankly already exists. We believe that we will create a whole lot more auto opportunities when we have the ability to do it in the same time that a client could drink a cup of coffee. The last thing I would mention is that new revenue opportunities are also about redirecting our existing sales team. Our largest officer-level sales team in the organization is our market leader team, the folks that manage our branch network.
One of the things that we believe we can use that team to do is to use our branch network to be advice centers for small businesses throughout our footprint. We know that there are over 3 million small businesses inside the market areas of our branches, and we know that in many cases, Chris described it earlier, those folks do not have CFOs. They do not have the same level of advisement that many large companies have. We believe our market leaders can do this. The beginning of this year, we put a huge focus on them spending the majority of their time out of the branch calling on small businesses. You'll see that our market leaders are now calling on 10,000 more small businesses a week than was taking place in the past.
In addition to just being out, they're delivering our small business version of Financial Insights. I'll share with you, I've had the opportunity to personally go on a number of those calls. I will tell you, the small businesses, they are not used to having that level of feedback from a banker. We think this could be a big winner for us in the future and a fantastic way for us to deploy our existing branch network. Those are just a few examples of some of the revenue opportunities that exist. I want to talk a little bit about optimization and the things that are taking place from an optimization perspective. The number one that I know is on everyone's mind is: What are we doing with our branch network?
You guys are aware, Chris shared the results earlier in what we've done in 2016, 2017, and 2018 from a branch closing perspective, and I'll tell you that we will continue that in 2019. This just gives you a sense of the trajectory that we're on. One question you may have, and I know a question that has been raised is, well, what is the optimal number? In order to answer that question, I think it's best to understand how we determine which of these we should close. I wanted to share this detail with you. For every branch in our network, we assign two scores.
We assign a score that rates the viability of the individual branch. What do transactions look like and where are they trending? The most important component is, how is that branch doing in generating new revenue relative to its cost? We assign a score of 1 to 5 being most viable, 1 being least viable. We also assign a market viability score. When we look at our branches, we say, okay, what markets have the most opportunity for us? We could have some poor-performing branches in really good markets, and we want to be careful about closing the branches where we still have opportunity. You'll see in the graph here, the chart, that the majority of our closures are taking place in the branches where they're low market viability and also low branch viability.
This chart also informs other components of our branch strategy. In the great markets where our branches are not performing well, that may mean we need to relocate that branch. That may mean we need different management in that branch, a different staffing component in that branch. We allow this to really shape how do we maximize that footprint. Now, to the question of what's the optimal number, the answer to that is it's fluid. Because this metric is based on revenue versus cost, as revenue migrates to other channels, then the number that are going to show up as fit in the equation and that you should close, it's going to increase. This, I think, gives us a rational approach to how we look at rationalizing the network.
I would also say we've been very focused on retaining clients when we close a location. We track every vintage of closures, and you'll see the graphs here. We're very intentional about what we do with those branches. You'll see, the site selection process is very intentional, the outreach, the marketing. We work very hard to migrate the clients of those closed branches to other channels, and we give them incentives to do so. That effort's been quite successful. As you all will see, on average, we retain 98.5% of the clients in a branch that we close. This is a big part of what we're doing. It's significant dollars that can be applied to reinvestment, and we're excited about what the future holds.
I don't have time to go through all these today, but I did want to include in the slide just a quick breakdown on opportunities that are going on in all the business units. Frankly, we have a significant opportunity in all of the high-volume consumer businesses to do a better job with consolidation, with automation. You'll see in each of those that is in fact taking place. That gives us the ability to make investments. I wanted to end the conversation by just giving you a flavor of how we're thinking about the investment component. Kelly described earlier and used the analogy of the home, that you have a home that you've lived in quite some time, and I just spent 20 minutes or so talking about that. You have to invest in what does the future home look like.
What I would describe to you over the next three pages is a general outline of the blueprint of the new home. I wanted you all to know that in each of the business units, we've actually spent the last year defining what that blueprint looks like. We know it'll change. We know it'll evolve. How do we have a thoughtful process about making the investments necessary for the future? Here are just a few examples for you. On the top here, you see what we're doing in the auto business, it's obviously about finding places where we can improve margins. It's about taking some of the loss volatility out of the business. It's a high-volume business, there is an enormous opportunity for automation and taking costs out. There's frankly, revenue opportunities that we have been missing in this space.
We have a very detailed five-year plan about how you get there. On the right-hand side, you'll see our mortgage business, it's ultimately, at the end of the day, about people and how do we take back market share by expanding our retail network. It's also about digital. A lot of the experience, both in the front room and the back room, that's changing the mortgage business as a result of what's happening with technology. We also know it's about data. We have $110 billion servicing book, how do we use the data that exists there to better execute from a mortgage perspective? The team has spent quite a bit of time thinking about what the future of that looks like. We have the same thing going on in our card-based businesses. In our card-based businesses, it's about products. Do we have world-class products?
We just rolled out a new set, made a big difference. It's also about how do we optimize the portfolio. How do we ensure we are top of mind for our clients? There are a number of things using data that our team is doing to do that. Ultimately, it's about that's a high-volume business, how do we optimize the business? How do we make it more effective? That is a combination of better execution and also technology. Lastly, I would just mention to you the community retail bank and what does that look like. One of the things that we've spent the last six months doing is actually going through a process. It's been very collaborative between myself and Donna Goodrich, Barbara Duck, Dontá Wilson, Bennett Bradley.
A number of folks have been involved in this effort of how do we take what we believe to be the future of the retail organization, and how do we deliver a blueprint for that, determine what our optimization opportunities are, and then what are potential reinvestment opportunities? Now, those could change. Those will evolve over time, but we need to have a blueprint. We need to start making those things in earnest. What I provided you here, and we've called that plan that we've spent 6 months building Retail Reimagine and Reinvestment plan. For short, we're calling it R3. It provides a holistic view of the things that we would want to do to evolve our platform to meet the needs of the future.
It involves things like additional marketing. We've had great success from the marketing that's taken place this year, so how do we ramp that up? Our client care centers, how do we provide a more seamless experience to our clients using maybe larger care centers, also, frankly, better technology and queuing the calls differently? Our branch channel-Chris mentioned it earlier, but in our branch channel, we got to continue to evolve the experience inside the branch. We also, frankly, even though we're closing branches, view branch expansion as an opportunity for us in certain markets. We're evaluating that and looking at where that might exist, and R3 creates the opportunity for us to do that. Our digital and online account opening abilities, how do we expand those but also enhance the ones we already have?
Dante and team, and now part of the retail bank, launched earlier this year, the Virtual Banking Center. One of the things that we know is that when you think about your retail clients, the more you engage them, whether it's through digital, whether it's through marketing, or whether it's through a human, the more opportunity you're going to have with them. The Virtual Banking Center gives us an opportunity to frankly engage clients that may not come to a branch or may not use a care center. Lastly, our ATM channel. We view that in the future, the ATM channel is an extension of your digital platform. Having a large ATM network also gives you ability to expand into certain markets, and we have some significant opportunities there, and a part of this plan is our ability to thoughtfully invest there.
I would just close where I started. Hopefully, this gives you a quick overview of the things that we're doing as a group and the themes that are circulate around the actions that we're taking. I appreciate the time today. We're excited about what the future brings and excited about the trends that we're seeing from a results perspective. Thank you. At this time, I want to introduce David Weaver. David? Good job, man.
Well, good morning, everybody. It's great to be here. Certainly appreciate the opportunity to spend a few minutes with you this morning to update you on a number of the things we're working on in the commercial community bank. We are very excited about the opportunity we have to continue to evolve our business so that we can continue to do a fantastic job taking care of our clients, as well as continuing to differentiate ourselves in what has become a very crowded space in the commercial banking arena. Finally, finding ways to more positively deliver revenue in a very efficient and productive way.
What I want to touch on today, there'll be a lot of things I cover, a core theme that I want you to hear that I think you've already heard a little bit about this morning is sort of the change we're undergoing in the commercial bank. First, we do operate a premier model for commercial banking at BB&T. It is a model that is focused on differentiation, a model that is focused on high touch, high client service. It is a model that focuses on really adding value to our clients' relationships every day. We'll touch on that in just a second. At the same time, the world is changing very rapidly.
Our client expectations are changing, the competitive landscape is changing, we do recognize that we have a real opportunity to continue to drive efficiency so that we can maintain the level of quality that our clients expect. We're leveraging data, we're digitizing processes, we're changing things very rapidly in order to continue to be able to deliver that premier client experience, we're not sitting idly by. We are taking bold actions, we're moving at breakneck pace, we're changing a lot of things to drive that perfect client experience. BB&T, we do operate a little bit of a different model. We're organized into 24 community bank regions. Our community banks regions are led by a regional president. The regional president is responsible for managing the commercial business, more importantly, they are the chief integrator. They pull everything together from a client perspective.
You've heard that touched on a couple of different times today, in our business, it's about local decision-making, local delivery, building those unique relationships at the client level. We do serve 155,000 clients in the commercial community bank, broken down in our small business, commercial real estate, regional corporate segments. They are outlined here from a segmentation threshold before you from a revenue band perspective, which give you a good idea of how we serve those clients. We do represent a good part of BB&T's diversification strategy. We're responsible for 23% of the revenue, 33% of the net income. We also represent good diversification within our own space. Our portfolio, which is now about $52.5 billion, is 62% C&I, 38% CRE. We have an excellent diversified deposit base. In fact, we represent a very stable and cost-advantaged funding source.
We have about $60 billion in deposits in my group. 58% of those deposits are non-interest-bearing. From a revenue mix perspective, we get 54% of our revenue from our deposit business, 30% of our revenue from our lending business, and 16% of our revenue from our non-interest income sources. Our performance has been very solid over the last few years. Loan growth has been good. On a compounded annual basis, we've been growing the portfolio about 4%. We are very happy with that growth rate. Obviously, it's a very frothy market. We take a very disciplined approach to underwriting, and we've adhered to that approach through this late-blooming cycle. We think the 4% number stacks up very well from an H.8 data perspective, and we feel like we fare well against our peers. Our deposit business is going very well. Our non-interest-bearing deposits have grown 4.4%.
I will tell you that has slowed a bit in recent quarters. We are still growing the non-interest-bearing deposit business, which is, we think, positively differentiated from our peers, many of which have begun to shrink. We are certainly continuing to grow that business. Loan production is doing well. It's up 5.7% over the last couple of years on a compounded annual basis. We are down a little bit this year, and that's primarily because our tax-exempt business has slowed pretty dramatically. We're off about $1 billion this year in production, given the tax law changes. We're working on a number of different things to diversify our production strategy. I'll talk about that in just a second. Pre-provision net revenue is up 20% on a compounded annual basis to $1.65 billion. Revenues are up a little, 4.7%, almost $2.7 billion.
Our non-interest income business is up 4.8% to $430 million. Pre-tax income is up 13.9% at $1.48 billion. Our efficiency ratio is down nicely to slightly over 37%. We've taken about 15 percentage points out of the efficiency ratio over the last couple of years, primarily by focusing on driving revenue, but also taking cost out of the model. We've taken about 225 FTEs out of the model over the last couple of years. We do think as we focus and continue to focus on generating positive operating leverage, we have a decent runway to continue to drive cost down and revenue up. The portfolio quality is outstanding. As you see here, past dues at the end of the third quarter, three basis points. Our charge-offs are at six basis points this year. They were six basis points last year, four basis points the year before that.
We have a very clean portfolio. Non-performing loans are down to 57 basis points. We think we can deliver on that excellent performance primarily by the unique and differentiated model we have in commercial banking. It's a very client-focused model first and foremost. It's all about putting the client first in everything that we do. We focus on staying very close to our clients. We focus on building great relationships with our clients. It's about local decision-making, local delivery. It's about really building on those relationships and adding value through the building of those relationships that differentiates us in the marketplace. We also run a very associate-focused model. We believe in having the best bankers on the street. We believe in empowering them.
We believe in giving them the best tools and resources and letting them do what they do best, which is really taking care of the client. We're community-focused model. You've heard that here the last few days. Certainly, we're focused on financial wellness. We're focusing on delivering leadership solutions through the Leadership Institute, and we take an acute focus towards rewarding the shareholders. We maintain a strong credit and risk management culture, but we're very focused on growing revenue, growing the balance sheet, and certainly managing expenses at a highly disciplined level. When we go to market, what we really focus on is the client, and it all starts with the client. Delivering outstanding client experience is what we're really all about. As we said, we're a relationship-oriented company. Our clients appreciate that, but it's also gotten great recognition in the marketplace from people like Greenwich.
Last year, as Chris pointed out, we did receive 24 Greenwich Excellence Awards. Over the last nine years, we received 181 Excellence Awards in the small business and middle market space. That's more than any other bank in our peer group. We're very proud of that. Through this first half of this year, Greenwich has recognized us as delivering peer-leading results in things like overall satisfaction, responsiveness, understanding the industries that we serve, as well as an excellent credit delivery model. One of the reasons we think we get the differentiated client experience level is our integrated relationship management strategy. That is a core fundamental strategy at BB&T. It's not about delivering products and services to our client from that orientation.
It is about building very deep relationships where we really figure out what our clients want, what are their hopes and dreams, what do we need to do to help support them to achieve economic success and financial security. It's a model built on trust and mutual supportiveness, where we come together and we help them meet their needs. We deliver that primarily through our Financial Insights tool. You've heard that mentioned. We do have a booth out front. We'd love to show you more about that. This is really about changing the conversation with the client. We don't go to the client and try to sell them something. We go to the client, really, and engage with them in a very customized discovery process where we go through and have conversations with them so that we can gain very deep understanding of their industry, of their business.
It's about really drilling deeply into the financials and figuring out how we can find ways to help them grow their business. How can we challenge them to get better? We do a lot of things that really, we think, take the relationship to the next level. One of the primary things we focus on through the Financial Insights process is helping our clients with their leadership challenges. All of you certainly had the opportunity, or most of you did, to visit the Leadership Institute last night. We're doing great things over there. What we try to do with this with our commercial clients is help our clients with leadership development, talent development, team building, change management, engagement. It's really about taking that to the next level.
We think it is our duty, it is our responsibility as a partner, as a trusted advisor, to help our clients become better leaders. To the extent that they can do that, obviously, their business thrives. We all win from that perspective, but it is a key way that we differentiate ourselves and take the conversation to the next level. Don't just trust my word for it. I want to show you a quick video that has a few of our clients that highlight some of the impacts that we've made in their lives around Financial Insights and the Leadership Institute.
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While we're doing a lot of things really, really well, there's an opportunity to always do better. The fact of the matter is the world has changed. It's changing very fast, and we have to change with it. It really starts from a client expectation perspective. One of the things we've been observing is client expectations are changing at a very, very rapid pace. Call it the Amazon effect, call it whatever you want to call it, but our clients want solutions now. They want it on their time, and they want world-class execution. What we're trying to do to do that is change our bank, and you've heard a little bit about this morning. Clients have also told us they want to have a trusted advisor. They want to have someone that challenges them. They want to have someone that is responsive and brings solutions to them.
We believe that the banks that go through and do the tough things to change will be the banks that survive. We are going to rapidly change in order to meet our clients expectations. At the same time, we're streamlining and simplifying processes through digitization. The ease of doing business is key. It's the number one driver of satisfaction. We're striving to be the easiest bank to do business with. We're going to give our relationship managers more tools to enable their productivity. We're going to leverage and drive data more effectively, and we're going to create better products. How are we doing this? Our team came together earlier this year and put together what we're calling our Big Five commercial plan, and it's really about driving and continuing our differentiated client experience strategies. It's about finding more productivity and efficiency in our business.
It's about evolving our sales and service model. It's about using technology to support all of these things. Finally, it's about enhancing our product offering and driving a more robust solution for our client. What are we doing to drive client experience? First and foremost, we feel like we have to strengthen the Truist Insights tool. It is a game changer. It has changed the conversation with our clients. It has significantly differentiated us in the marketplace, but we can do a lot more. Earlier this year, we took the step of implementing robotics to enable us to certainly prepare and deliver many more of these presentations. We doubled our output from 400 to 800. We think we can do more from that perspective. At the same time, we've got to enhance the content that goes into these solutions.
We need to pull in things like news and social media. We need to pull in things like industry articles and other things to help our clients see what they need to be doing in order to be more successful. We want to deepen the financial analysis. We want to take it to the next level. We're doing a good job today reviewing our clients' performance and how they benchmark against industry averages. We want to take that to a best in class kind of an opportunity. We want to challenge our business owners to look at what their peers, their competitors are doing, and really help us craft solutions in order to help them drive their business to the next level using what if modeling and tools, et cetera. We want to do a better job capturing knowledge.
There is a lot of information that flows out of the Financial Insights process. We want to get that embedded into our centralized Salesforce system. We want to do a better job around creating client profiles. We have a ton of data on our clients. How do we pull that together? How do we educate our bankers, prepare them more holistically for the call before they engage in these opportunities? We want to automate recommendations. We're using AI to begin to figure out ways to drive a more consistent delivery of the Financial Insights tool, where products and services can come out of these interactions. Finally, we want to support follow-up more holistically.
At the end of the day, what we're trying to do with this is to implement robotics and AI in order to automate what has historically been a very paper manual-based program, in order to drive a better experience, in order to elevate the focus of our bankers, in order to really position us as a trusted advisor in the marketplace. It's a big, big opportunity. At the same time, we want to improve our ease of doing business. As I said, we want to be the easiest bank to do business with. We've been very focused on this over the last year or so. We've really started in thinking through ways to reconceptualize our lending process. The interesting point is, as Greenwich tells us, our lending process is very favorably perceived in the marketplace.
Relatively speaking, we have one of the best experiences from a lending perspective in our peer group. This isn't about coming from a position of weakness. It's about coming from a position of strength and really skating to where the puck is going to be. We firmly believe that you have to be the absolute best at delivery in order to be effective in this space. We started earlier this year with our commercial optimization council. We identified 26 process improvements. We implemented those. That led to our collaborative laboratory process, where we put 11 cross-functional associates in a room with an objective to do one simple thing, and that's how to make a loan faster at BB&T. Through process mapping, we realized it was taking us about 28 days to deliver an equipment loan at BB&T.
We challenged this group to come up with a way to make that loan in three days. They did that. We've implemented that. It's going extremely well. In fact, we get all kinds of positive accolades from our clients around this. We just heard a good story the other day. In the midst of the hurricane, one of our clients came to us, a tree service company in Eastern North Carolina, and said that they needed to buy new equipment in order to facilitate the cleanup of some of the hurricane damage. They applied on Monday afternoon. We closed the loan Tuesday morning. That equipment was in the field doing work on Tuesday afternoon. That kind of responsiveness, that kind of turnaround, has not been something we historically could have delivered on. We're making great progress from that perspective.
That leads us to our end-to-end process redesign, something Chris mentioned just a moment ago. We are super excited about the opportunity that will bring us relative to driving efficiency, but also, more importantly, driving a client experience that we think can be unprecedented when we execute on that. It's not just about the credit process, though. We're doing a lot around other aspects of our client engagement. It's around new account onboarding. It's around delivering treasury through an onboarding portal. It's about streamlining the account opening process. We're looking at everything in order to improve our client engagement and certainly make processes that are more client-friendly. From a productivity perspective, obviously, lots of opportunity there. Certainly, fundamentally, we believe that developing and hiring and retaining the best people, giving them the best training, giving them the best tools and resources is obviously fundamental.
We also want to drive more robust activity out of our associates. We mentioned doing 800 financial insights a month. We're moving that to 1,250 as an objective. Talking about client touches, we touch 1.3 clients a day. We're going to move that to two a day. That's 100,000 additional client touches a year. Talk about prospecting. We have a huge opportunity to take our great story on the road. We're touching 0.5 prospects a day. We're taking that to one prospect a day, 75,000 additional touches annually. We firmly believe if you believe our model, beliefs, behaviors, results, which is absolutely fundamental to who we are, driving behaviors will drive better results. Giving our bankers the tools to allow them to execute on driving those behaviors is something we're very focused on. Certainly, leveraging our sales process is a big opportunity.
Adhering to our segmentation, driving and leveraging our new incentive program in a big way. We have a new revenue-based incentive model that is getting outstanding results. Our bankers are truly changing behaviors around that, which is very important. Driving deeper penetration of our core commercial products. We've been able this year to increase our referral activity per banker by 25% and increase, at the same time, our conversion rates by eight percentage points. We're driving more referral activity, better quality referrals that are resulting in closed business for our company, which is something we're very focused on. By the way, we think the financial insights process is a big driver of that success. Sales and service model evolution is a big deal, and we're doing a lot of work around this currently.
When you think about BB&T's portfolio in my space, it's a very, very granular portfolio. 78% of my clients owe us less than $1 million. That is a very small business-oriented kind of portfolio. That's a good thing from a granularity perspective, but a tough thing from a servicing perspective. We are re-conceptualizing our small business delivery model, which is presenting a huge opportunity for us. It starts with revising segmentation. It also leads to building out a centralized sales team, providing more centralized credit support. Just at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is find a more efficient and pleasurable way for us to serve these clients. This doesn't mean our small business clients aren't important to us. Quite the contrary, they're extremely important to us.
To the extent that we can serve them more efficiently, which at the same time will free up our bankers to move upstream to higher value clients, presents a tremendous opportunity for us. We're also optimizing our market structures. We're looking at geography. We're looking at spans and layers. We're looking at how we use player coaches. At the end of the day, what we're trying to do is have more bankers on the street driving revenue, touching clients, fewer managers, fewer backroom support. We do believe that we have a huge opportunity there to certainly leverage the resources that we do have. At the same time, we're differentiating markets based on opportunity. If you think about our footprint, we operate in very diverse markets. We are in high-growth markets like Texas and Florida. We're in slower growth markets like Eastern North Carolina, Kentucky, West Virginia.
That geographic diversity presents a lot of advantages to us, and we feel very good about being in different markets. We obviously get growth out of the growth markets, but at the same time, we get stability and profitability out of some of the slower growth markets. They don't boom, and they don't bust, and that's a very good thing. We have a tremendous opportunity, which we're very focused on, is migrating resources from slower growth markets into higher growth markets. As an example, in Texas, we are staffed for growth. Our bankers carry smaller portfolios. They have higher call objectives. They have higher objectives around developing business, more growth, and we're getting it. We're getting double-digit growth out of those markets.
In Eastern North Carolina, as an example, we have to focus on managing the book we have and staffing it accordingly and make sure we take great care of those clients and preserving those relationships, but also maximizing the returns that we can get out of those markets. Technology presents a huge opportunity for us. It's certainly a tremendous opportunity for my business as well. It really begins with building an end-to-end online platform. Really, our clients deserve the ability to be able to self-serve in everything that they do. We're not going to migrate them to an online platform unless they choose to do so. Having digitized onboarding is a big deal. How we onboard deposit accounts, how we onboard treasury, how we onboard the lending businesses, how we onboard many of our other products and services is a big deal.
This is also about how we use data more effectively. We have a tremendous amount of information on our clients, and to the extent that we can capture that data, leverage it, and certainly use it for doing automation around recommendations and advice is a big, big deal. We're going to leverage that primarily by taking more advantage of our Salesforce platform. We are a Salesforce-enabled company and have been for 4 or 5 years. We're beginning to capture data and use that data to help us prioritize client and prospect outreach based on opportunities, based on activity, based on history, based on perceived needs. We have 155,000 clients. We have to do a much better job of making sure that we're touching all those clients in the proper priorities. We also want to integrate financial insights into the Salesforce platform.
Again, the ability to harness and capture that data is a very, very powerful tool. We're making great progress relative to that. We got a lot going on from a product perspective as well. We're super excited about what we're rolling out in our small business and middle market space around this whole product bundle concept. What we're effectively doing, we've identified 14 industries. We're building product suites around those industries. We're taking advantage of that by arming our bankers not only with a world-class product offering, but at the same time, leads, marketing, financial insights, the financial insights tool. We're attacking the market. We've started this quarter with veterinarian practices, dental practices, and medical practices. We're seeing excellent response from the marketplace.
We're seeing great opportunities, growth in pipeline around those opportunities. We're going to roll out three more industries on each subsequent quarter until we have the whole platform launched. We're real excited about that. We also got a lot going on from a lending perspective. We have just launched a streamlined working capital solutions operating model. We firmly believe that to be a world-class C&I bank, we have to be excellent at delivering asset-based lending solutions and secured finance solutions. We launched a new model earlier this summer. We're seeing great progress there. That portfolio is growing now 15% in the back half of the year. Our goal is to double production in 2019, which we think is very achievable. We also launched our dealer commercial services platform, a growth plan earlier this year.
It's been a good business for us for a number of years. We really have seen that escalate this year under this growth plan. A 59% increase in production. We're growing that business double digits nicely, 16%, 17%. We think that has good runway as we move forward. We've expanded our SBA lending program. Production's up 33%. We've leveraged our single-family platform in a number of growth markets. We're seeing that portfolio grow nicely after many years of decline. The deposit business is doing really well. I showed you some of the statistics around that. We do have an opportunity and are rolling out a new product offering in the first part of the year, which we think will fill a void and fill a gap.
We're really looking at maintaining the momentum we have from a non-interest-bearing production perspective, and we're going to make sure we keep that momentum as we move forward. We also are real excited about some of the opportunities we have in the treasury space. 2019 is a big product launch year for us. We have our Cash Manager online platform being revamped. We have a single sign-on portal on the docket. We are going to finish the journey on real-time payments. There's a lot going on from a treasury perspective, and I tell you, I'm super excited with the recent alignment of treasury and commercial deposits and association services within the community bank commercial area. We're going to do great things from a deposit perspective, and we're going to continue to drive that forward very positively.
We do feel like in the community bank, we are well-positioned to evolve, to grow, and we do think that driving performance is a big element of our focus. We've made good progress. We've got a long way to go, and we're real excited about the opportunity. At a real fundamental level, however, it's about people, process, and product. We think there's four things that we need to stay focused on in order for us to execute on our mission. First and foremost, we got to maintain and build strong client relationships. Our clients are key, and to the extent that we can do a great job continuing to take care of them, to the extent that we can bring in new clients, tell our story in the marketplace, and aggressively focus on business development, we think we will be successful.
In order to be successful at doing that, however, we got to continue to find ways to add value through differentiation. Differentiation is very, very important in our space. Obviously, our products are not largely different from the next banks, how we present ourselves, how we go to market, how we add value to our clients is a big, big deal, and we're very focused on that. We're going to obviously continue to invest in the business. We're going to continue to evolve the business. That's a big opportunity. Finally, and probably most importantly, we're going to find ways to improve processes through streamlining structure. I cannot speak to how important this is for us.
To the extent that we find opportunities to continue to leverage what we're doing to expand on the offerings that we're making every day and doing it in a more efficient and holistic way is a big, big opportunity for us. If we do these four things, we are very, very confident that we will continue to drive the financial results in a very positive way that I showed you before. Thank you all very much. Enjoy the rest of your stay. We look forward to engaging with you at the breaks and lunch. Take care.
At this time, we're going to have our morning break. The exhibits are open, and the restrooms, as you leave the auditorium, are to your right. Refreshments are outside and available for you. We're going to begin promptly at 10:15 A.M., so a little over 35 minutes. Thank you.
Thank you for spending your day with us. If you think about it, where else can you spend a day hearing about the success and growth of one of the country's finest financial services companies and also get a turkey call? For those of you who picked up your turkey call, or if you haven't, I'm sure you will, let me give you an additional forward-looking disclosure. If you're counting on that for next Thursday, you better not wait until Wednesday to try it. I would say jump on it quickly. I'm Rufus Yates, Manager of Financial Services and Commercial Finance Businesses for BB&T. I really want to go over with you the differentiating products and services that we incorporate in this group of companies to serve our clients, both supporting Brant's retail initiative, David's commercial and regional corporate initiative, and our own large corporate and institutional platform.
There are 4 real takeaways on this segment. One is revenue growth. You'll see a lot of diversified fee income that comes from managing client-invested assets. You'll see asset diversification. We have meaningful C&I books of business that both bring us industry expertise and diversification, as well as geographic diversification. We've got bankers scattered now all over the country, realizing the advantages of diversified books. We also support, through our wealth segment, growing really high-quality retail relationships. Our industry expertise is a core differentiator for us. In a world of financial sameness, what do you really do to differentiate our service proposition, our value offering from the competitors? You've got to have insightful, focused advice to give clients. At the end of the day, it's about helping our clients achieve economic success and financial security. I'll tell you, we are focused and diligent about that.
We spend a tremendous amount of time consulting with our partners in the community and commercial and corporate bank to make sure the team members that this group represents come in and really add material value to those. Today, we really are a powerhouse investment management business. If you think about how we segment, this just gives you sort of the spray of how we serve these clients. The mass affluent clients, building more of a digital solution, self-service. We are spending a lot of time with our digital partners enhancing that solution. The affluent, the $5 million-$2 million, really those clients are being served through centers of excellence that are centrally located, served by regional advisors. You get to the more customized solutions through our high net worth, and of course, our institutional platform. Full complement of products and services.
There are no gaps today in the service delivery system that we have there. When you think about how do we differentiate from a wealth perspective, we have a planning-centric business model. We bring clients in individually and go through personal financial plans with them. We fully believe every client should have a financial plan. When we do that, they then bring the whole power of the integrated bank to play. They bring both the BB&T Securities Financial Advisors, the capital market solutions, maybe it's a strategic M&A transaction. Commercial banking in the community bank. When we deal with private clients in the C-suite and the owners of those companies, we are able to go in and do a personal plan while David's team is doing a strategic plan, financial insights plan for the business. Our life insurance partners. Insurance is a core component of financial planning.
We have strong partnership with our insurance partners to provide financial advice there. What's the opportunity really look like for us? Forrester did a survey. There's approximately 126,000 retail households in the country. Forrester surveyed them to see how do they segment from the way we deliver our business. You see the mass affluent segment here on the left. Forrester suggests 26% of retail households would fit this 1 to 500,000 investable assets. Today, we serve 125,000 of those clients in our own house. We know there's 320,000 that we've identified and profiled. So we're serving only about 40% of what we know. If we look at Forrester's guidance, it would suggest there's 1.3 million clients today in BB&T system, where if we can identify where their assets are, we can be their mass affluent advisor.
Looking at core in the middle, this is where we really built our wealth platform. Today, you see we're serving 76% of our known clients. Using Forrester's research would suggest there's 300,000 of those clients. So we're only serving 26% of the potential. These aren't clients that we've got to go into the market and find. These are clients who are already customers of BB&T. We just need to bring their assets in the house. And the ultra-high net worth, the $25 million and greater, we have a very high penetration rate, 95% of the known clients. Forrester would suggest there's another 3,000 of those out there. So the opportunity is here, the opportunity is meaningful, and the clients today are seeing great value from the advice that we're providing. What are we going to do to grow this business? Improve the client experience.
You're going to hear a lot more about our digital transformation. We're enhancing our products and solutions. We're bringing greater tools to our associates, and we're expanding the business model. Looking at our digital platform, the U platform. Today, our clients go in, manage their financial lives. For the wealth segment, we really want to create a portal where you will go in and see your entire financial life. You'll have your financial plan embedded through the U portal. You'll be able to bring all of your other financial assets that are housed in other institutions, aggregate them on your desktop, and see your full life. You'll be able to handle all of your payments. You'll have a document vault where you'll put all of your important papers. In other words, the wealth client will have a holistic financial experience.
They will come to BB&T site to see every aspect of their life. Bringing our trust and brokerage platforms closer together, making it seamless to our trust clients and our brokerage and advisory clients when they're using both products. We'll be able to move, transport, and see performance reporting in a consistent way. Digital advice. Building digital supported solutions with advisors. You hear the term robo-advisor a lot. We want digital assisted advice. We are building the infrastructure to be able to bring early-stage investors into this channel, but we're also going to make absolutely certain the client will always have the opportunity to opt into a higher level or higher touch advice. We've enhanced our wealth lending capabilities in direct partnership with the Community Bank to build the tools, the products, the services that meet the unique borrowing needs of the wealth client. Robotics, chat enablement.
All of the things that you will hear us talk about for the commercial and retail system will also be very important differentiators for us on the wealth side. Advisor mobility. This is a big issue for us. Giving our associates the ability to transact with their clients where they are, to be able to take the financial planning tools that we provide, and put them, and allow our associates to have digital enabled tablets so they will be able to sit down and manage clients' relationships remotely with them. Client communications. Dontá is working very closely with us as we up-tier our financial insights and our perspectives communications, sending targeted information to clients about issues that matter to them, particularly in the wealth segment, where there's transaction issues around economic cycles, around industry issues. We're going to deliver solutions electronically that way. Building those early-stage client investors, very important.
Helping clients get started on the dream journey of building their wealth. Working through our centrally located advisor channel. We've now initiated and stood up a retirement resource center so that there is a place to go inside the organization for clients and associates to be able to learn more about how to manage their retirement needs. Expanding in core markets. You will see us opening jointly wealth offices that have brokerage and full-service advisory in partnership. As we have built this business, I thought you might find it interesting to really hear a client experience. I look forward to sharing with you one of our client's journey.
Jack Cassell. My relationship with BB&T has developed over a number of years. It's been a tremendous relationship. It's almost 30 years old now. There's a range of services that BB&T offers me. My relationship with BB&T started with a guy named Rick Springer. When we first went out to try to get a loan, we went to four companies. Rick took a chance on my company, made a loan to us. The commercial line of credit became very valuable to us. I decided at that point that BB&T is my bank forever.
The most important way to earn trust with clients is to sit back and to listen. I want to hear their story, what they have to say, and find out what their needs are. Jack and I met through the business relationship through Rick Springer, that made a perfect connection for us to move forward.
When my company started, we had three offices and 25 employees. As we grew over the years, we had 86 offices and 1,000 employees. When I went to sell the business, it was a very emotional time for me. That was the time when BB&T became the most beneficial. We had a really professional guy named Keith Prusak. He knew exactly what he was doing. He got the very best price for me, for the company.
We were able to develop a strategy, negotiate a price, reduce the taxes that Jack and his family would be responsible for, and make sure everybody was taken care of moving in the future.
After the sale of my company, Mike Thompson has become extremely important. He made sure that I was comfortable because all of a sudden, I didn't have a business.
As their wealth advisor, we sit on the same side of the table. We are their advocate. There's something in the DNA of many of our clients, our entrepreneurs, where they will just never slow down.
I just have interest in the challenge of starting a new business and getting new things rolling and having successes. BB&T looks and evaluates these investment opportunities with me.
There's a lot of math, a lot of economic modeling that goes behind, okay, if I invest this amount of money in this venture, what does that do to my comprehensive planning?
We have an annual trust meeting here in Jupiter, Florida, every year. From the BB&T side, we have at least four people come down. We also talk about my personal planning and also any other businesses that I'm looking to start. It's a time when I realize the great attention that BB&T gives to myself and my family, and we really appreciate it.
BB&T provided the financing for Jack's dream home.
There's a beautiful sunset here almost every single night, and we love having our friends over and entertaining here.
When Jack or any of the clients that I work with achieve their goals, that's a sign of my success.
Jack is the story that every bank wants to be able to tell. There's never been a time in my history with BB&T that I didn't feel like I was their most important customer.
It's a great example of how our advisory business partners with the various parts of the financial services group to bring the value proposition to life. This company was built. We advised on the banking side. When he was ready for a strategic decision, we took him to market, then we managed the wealth on the other side. As he expands and grows other businesses, we will be his bank. Moving to the corporate and institutional business for us, our driver here is to really become more meaningful provider of solutions to clients as we grow our balance sheet commitment. As we up-tier in the corporate and institutional platform, we're able to earn the right to provide fee-based services and solutions. Today, at $672 million year to date, it's tracking to about a $900 million company.
36% of our C&I book is represented with this part of our business, 14% of our commercial deposits at $9 billion, all driven by 3,000 clients, served by 677 associates. A high yield when you bring these relationships into the organization. Full service financial delivery today. There is not a product gap with this group. When we bring and we represent BB&T as a corporate partner, we can bring every capital solution that they might need. Our leading fee-based partners, insurance. You're going to hear a lot from John about the build-out there. Treasury, capital markets, access to the debt markets as well. The Leadership Institute is a real differentiator for this group.
As you think about the partnership with corporate, our equipment finance businesses today, when we look at our equipment, our large ticket leasing business, it's about a 65% overlap with our corporate book. We've really brought those businesses together and aligned them in a common distribution platform, giving us a great amount of leverage. Where do we really grow this C&I book, and how does it offer industry diversification? Today, retail is about 17% of our portfolio. Retail for us, if you think about it, is really driven by our supply chain finance business, our automotive aftermarket. It's driven by our food, beverage, and ag businesses. This is not big box retail. This isn't retail competing with Amazon. This is distribution companies, whether it's food or drug or the AutoZone types of the world. Financial services, driven really by our exposure to high-grade public REITs.
Healthcare, 3% of our portfolio, but the majority of our healthcare and senior living support here and educational support is done in partnership with David and Brant in the community bank. The portfolio really resides there. Our industrial platform, sort of a core part of the business for us, 35%, is smokestack America. People who make things, extruders, aggregate managers. Energy for us, upstream E&P, producing, performing upstream clients. Our high-grade utility business would fit there as well. The segment that we're underrepresented in really is the business services and technology. We've started an initiative to really learn more about that business. We've brought in associates all on the West Coast who are really guiding us through a process of looking at where we can introduce our financial service solutions to that part of the business.
Today, we participate on the distribution side, but we'll be spending more time going forward looking at all aspects of technology and business services. What have we done to the balance sheet? What have we done to our commitments as we've gone through this? This graph, I'll just try to explain that the hash line here is BB&T's peer. It's at our allocations in Shared National Credits. It's where our average would be. The far right-hand side, we today sit in year-to-date 2018, our average commitment in a Shared National Credit is about $54 million. This compares us to the peers who participate in the same transactions. The point that I would make here is we've got great opportunity to continue to grow our participation in these large corporate deals without outsizing the organization in comparison to our peers.
This does not include JPMorgan, Wells Fargo. This is really regional competitors. At our $54 million, you see the highest you would see is $890 million and $100 million. We're still tracking in the bottom third of aggregate commitments. Conservative, well-managed credit culture with meaningful opportunity to grow there. What have we done with our national coverage? I mentioned that we were expanding our reach nationally with our loan production offices. Today, we're seeing our LPO strategy generate about 13%-14% year-over-year growth. A disproportionate amount of our net new clients are coming from clients outside of the core bank-branded franchise. This chart just shows you clients greater than $500 million in revenue. What's our share of the client book? How many clients would we know? This suggests a little less than 10% on the West Coast are clients of ours.
Huge growth potential today with the over $500 million segment there. This just traffics across how we quadrant the country and how we cover. It would suggest there's opportunity in every market. What's optimal for us here would really traffic more towards the 30%-40%. A large portion, the remainder would be clients that either structure or pricing would not be attractive to us, or maybe an industry that we wouldn't lend into. Meaningful opportunity for continued growth as we expand this national coverage. We've expanded our San Francisco, Denver, and Texas platforms with recent hires. We're bringing in high-quality bankers who have experience in their markets that can introduce us to net new clients. Our BB&T's balance sheet is a very attractive partner for these clients. We're getting nice up-tier lift from those.
You see that our focus on technology, using the new team that we've brought in on the West Coast to really look at that segment, that will cover the country nationally with that group, and our opportunity to continue to up-tier existing relationships. Today, this business represents about 40% of their income comes from the fee opportunity that's driven off of these credit commitments. We'd love to see that percentage rate increase, and we think it can. As we become more strategically important to these clients as a credit provider, we will be rewarded with higher participation rates on the fee side. This is just a quick example of how that works. Ryder System, a transportation logistics company, asset-based company.
We materially increased our credit commitment to Ryder. We were rewarded after that commitment with the ability to come in and provide an M&A advisory solution for them. We had a successful M&A transaction. We then were invited to participate in their public debt issuance. We've now done four transactions with Ryder since increasing our credit commitment, and now we've engaged our equipment leasing team to be a more meaningful provider of equipment finance solutions for Ryder. As we up-tier, it brings the whole value proposition to a much higher contribution level with these clients. We're very pleased with the success that we've had as we've grown these clients nationally. That brings me back to sort of where we started. Diversification around revenue, fee income driven from growing client-invested assets. Asset diversification through industry-focused C&I lending.
Geographic diversification through the offices that we have from New York and Boston now through San Francisco and L.A. The national platform has been successful. 40% of the C&I book today in the corporate arena outside of the franchise. Still meaningful room to grow. You saw our penetration rates. We've got the ability to materially up-tier and increase our client counts in those markets. Wealth, high-value proposition for retail. Bringing those wealth clients in, providing the full-service financial advisory, incorporating our trust powers, and building the ability to serve those clients through generational wealth transfer really is a differentiator. It allows us to not only serve those who are growing their wealth, but those who are in a position now to think about distributing their wealth.
Philanthropic services, which is part of our institutional services platform, allowing clients to give back to the communities that have empowered them to grow their wealth. Industry-specific solutions. Again, a diversification key for us is do you bring intellectual advice to the table that makes you look different in a world of financial sameness to our client base? We do that through the expertise of our industry teams and our targeted marketing strategies. We're very pleased with the growth that we've had in this business, and we think it positions us nicely for continued growth for the future. I'm very pleased to introduce John Howard, who's going to talk about our insurance capabilities.
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Good morning. That video is a good example of the importance of what we do. Within insurance, we are currently helping more than 5,000 of our clients recover from the devastating effects of Hurricane Florence and Hurricane Michael. When I think of the vision of BB&T and making the world a better place to live, that's a vision that we execute on every day because insurance is helping people and companies protect against economic loss. It's a risk transfer mechanism that allows them to invest and grow and contribute to our overall economy. Insurance is a business that has a history that goes back to biblical times. There were benevolent societies that would help people recover from economic loss. Since then, the industry has evolved tremendously. I think you would probably agree with me that we live in a world today that presents ever-increasing risk.
When I think about the way that we have developed properties, we continue to develop properties along the coasts. We continue to develop properties in low-lying flood-prone areas. We develop properties in more remote and rural areas. When we have occurrences like hurricanes, there's much greater exposure, same with floods, same with the forest fires that we're hearing about in California as we stand here today. That risk is greater than it ever has been before. Of course, it's aggravated by climate change. If you think of the past eight years in the U.S., we've had 12 1,000-year flood events. If you think of Houston, in just the past three years, we've had three 500-year flood events. There's a tremendous amount of risk that we're able to help protect. That's only in property.
If you take a minute and step back and think about casualty, think about the cyber exposure that exists today that continues to expand every year. Industry estimates are that more than 90% of that cyber risk is uninsured today. Presents a tremendous opportunity for us to help our clients. If you think about other types of risks that are emerging, whether you think of the Me Too movement, or you think of active shooters, or you think of workplace violence, all horrific events, all big risks, all things that we can help our clients protect against. When I go through my presentation today, I hope there are at least four things that you'll take away from it. The first is that BB&T Insurance Holdings is the fifth largest insurance broker in the world. It's a very unique business. The second is that we have favorable market conditions today.
For several years, we've had headwinds that we've had to overcome. Right now, we have tailwinds. Third, we have a transformation underway. This is a resilient business, and we are working very hard to improve the earnings trajectory from it. Fourth, this is a client-first business. We are very focused on providing world-class advisory services to our clients, and that gives us a great growth trajectory in future years. If you look at BB&T Insurance Holdings, I think one of the things that's important to recognize is we're not an insurance carrier. I titled this presentation Not So Risky Business, one, because I thought it was a neat play on words, but two, because I wanted to make it very clear, we're not an insurance carrier. We are not responsible for paying claims. We don't have that risk on our balance sheet. We are an advisor.
We are a consultant. We work with our clients to help them understand the risks that they have, some of which they may not even realize. We help them design insurance programs to address those risks. We help them place those insurance programs with insurance carriers, and we help our clients manage the overall cost of that risk. In the case that they have a loss, a covered loss, a valid claim, we advocate on their behalf to ensure that those claims are paid correctly. When you think about this business, I think of it as an income statement business, not as a balance sheet business. It's a commission and fee business. It's a business that has a 96-year history, going back to 1922. BB&T began in insurance a long time ago. We've actually acquired businesses that have even longer histories than that.
This year, we'll place $26 billion in insurance premium. That represents trillions of dollars of insurance coverage for our clients. As you'll see, we're the fifth largest broker in the world. One of the unique aspects of our platform is due to our ownership by BB&T, we have permanent capital behind us. The private equity industry considers insurance brokers to be very attractive properties and has a 20-year history of investing in insurance brokers and rolling up insurance brokers. Chris mentioned earlier that I joined BB&T six and a half years ago when BB&T acquired the company that I led. That was a company that was sponsored by private equity firms. I am in a position to have first-hand experience and know that with private equity ownership, it's not permanent capital. It's temporary capital.
With permanent capital, we're able to provide assurance to our associates and assurance to our clients that we're committed to this business, they know what the ownership is going to be of the business, and they know of our wherewithal to invest throughout the cycle. It's a really big advantage in our industry. Our culture is focused on our clients. You've heard it from BB&T. It is very true in BB&T Insurance. It is a client-first mentality. We have very strong relationships with the largest insurance companies in the world. If you look at BB&T Insurance Holdings, we have 230 offices across the U.S. and about 7,500 employees. What do we do? Well, we go to market through three main verticals. The first is retail. Retail is where we work directly with the purchaser of insurance.
We are advising that purchaser on their risks, on what insurance coverage is available to address those risks, how they should design an insurance program, how we can place that program, and then how we can lower their cost of insurance and ensure that claims are paid. Within our retail business, we have two major components today, McGriff Insurance Services and McGriff, Seibels & Williams. McGriff Insurance Services is the combination of what was called BB&T Insurance Services and Regions Insurance Group. Early April this year, we announced that we were acquiring Regions Insurance Group. We closed on that acquisition at the beginning of July. I should mention that last weekend, we completed our wholesale system conversions. Conversions went smoothly. The weekend prior to that, so two weekends ago, we completed our retail system conversions. Those conversions also went smoothly.
With the Regions Insurance Group acquisition, one of the most important things was ensuring that we retained the key talent with that acquisition. I'm pleased to report that we've retained 99.5% of the key individuals from the transaction. As a result of retaining the key people, having a good plan, having smooth conversions, we've been able to outperform our acquisition model for that business. One of the key dynamics was, of course, Regions Bank and BB&T Bank are competitors. Regions had some concerns about selling their insurance business to a competitor. One of the ways that we addressed that concern was by saying that we would rebrand the business, that we wouldn't brand it BB&T, which is how we came up with the McGriff Insurance Services name for the combination of BB&T Insurance Services and Regions Insurance Group.
It's building off of a fantastic retail brand that we have in McGriff, Seibels & Williams. McGriff is known throughout the insurance industry. It's highly respected, highly regarded, this was an opportunity for us to leverage that brand. Another advantage to the branding strategy is it creates better separation between our retail businesses and our wholesale businesses. I'll describe our wholesale business in more detail in just a minute, but the thought I'd like you to retain is that our retail business is a customer of our wholesale business, and competitors of our retail business are customers of our wholesale business. Naturally, it was advantageous to create more separation from a branding standpoint between those businesses. Within retail, McGriff Insurance Services deals more with what I would consider mid-market clients. Certainly personal lines clients, small business clients, but also mid-size commercial accounts.
It is a regional platform, it is strong from the Mid-Atlantic through the Southeast, into the Midwest, we have a good presence in California as well. McGriff Insurance Services isn't a national platform today. McGriff, Seibels & Williams is a national platform, it focuses on serving larger size commercial accounts. More complicated risks, more complicated placements. Shifting over to our wholesale division. Wholesale insurance is a business that is designed to support difficult placements for retail insurance brokers. Retail insurance brokers, on a daily basis, are out prospecting and building and developing relationships, they can't be experts in every risk category and every insurance carrier in the marketplace. What our wholesale business does is it develops very strong relationships with retail insurance brokers and then provides the expertise that they need for difficult placements to serve their clients.
Our wholesale insurance business is broken up into three components. CRC is the second largest wholesale property and casualty broker in the country. AmRisc is the largest provider of wind coverage for hurricane-exposed properties, and Crump Life is the largest wholesale distributor of life insurance and related products. When you think about the geographic coverage of those businesses, CRC is a national platform. AmRisc, since it's providing coverage for hurricane-exposed properties, is really a Southeastern platform, and Crump Life is a national platform. Then the third component of our segment, insurance holdings and premium finance, is premium finance, where we have about 25% market share. We're clearly an industry leader. With premium finance, what we do is we provide a vehicle for companies to pay their insurance premiums and not to have to pay them all at one time, so they're able to finance those premium payments.
We're able to build it into many of our quoting processes so that it is an easy path and an easy alternative for our clients to use. When I think of these businesses, I think that there's a lot of synergy that comes from having a really strong retail business that works with a really strong wholesale business, that work with a really strong premium finance business. That is a unique combination. When you think about our contribution to BB&T Corporation, we're one of the four segments that BB&T reports externally. On a year-to-date basis, we're 16% of BB&T's revenue. We're 7% of BB&T's net income. When I talk about the transformation that we're going through and our focus on improving profitability, this slide highlights the opportunity that we have. When you look at our peer group, we're the fifth largest insurance broker in the world.
The six largest insurance brokers in the world are all public companies. When you look at those public companies, they trade at multiples that are quite a bit higher than the multiples that banks trade at today. When I look at insurance holdings within BB&T, I think of it as this hidden gem that BB&T shareholders own at a multiple that is favorable to the multiples that our peers trade at. Then when you go down the list, if you look at USI and HUB, those are private equity-backed brokers. As you go even further down the list, you see more and more private equity-backed brokers. When I think about our position in the marketplace, I've already said the advantages that I believe we have from permanent capital.
I also believe that we have significant advantages from the overall scale of BB&T and the resources that it can provide, and I'll go into those in more detail in a few minutes. I commented on how we have a unique combination of businesses. When you think about the large retail organizations on this platform, they don't have wholesale components in the United States. In fact, Marsh's wholesale broker, they sold a few years ago, we own. Aon's wholesale broker, they sold a few years ago, we own. Willis' wholesale broker, they sold a few years ago and is one of our primary competitors. Arthur J. Gallagher has a wholesale broker, but it's a much smaller portion of their overall insurance brokerage business. Brown & Brown, the same is true. They own a wholesale broker, but it's a much smaller portion of their overall business.
When you look at having roughly a 50/50 balance between retail and wholesale insurance brokerage, we truly are unique. Another thing that is a unique characteristic of our business is our growth organically and our growth through acquisitions. If you go back 15 years to 2003, this is a business that was about $400 million in revenue. Now we're pretty close to $2 billion in revenue. Over the past 15 years, we've grown more than 500%. If you just go to a more recent time frame, if you go back to 2011 until today, we've more than doubled in size over that period of time. A lot of it through organic growth, some of it through acquisitions. We've done our four largest acquisitions over that time frame as well. When I think of those acquisitions, every one of them has been very successful.
The Crump Group acquisition that I mentioned earlier, we were able to combine with other businesses that BB&T owned previously to create this powerhouse wholesale platform that I mentioned. You see in 2016, we were able to complement that by buying Swett & Crawford to really create a wholesale powerhouse. With the Regions acquisition in 2018, we have a catalyst for our retail insurance business that puts us on a path for transformation there. If you look at the American Coastal sale that Chris mentioned earlier, it was about $140 million in revenue that we're taking out of revenue, even as we're showing this very significant growth. It gave us increased ownership in AmRisc, which is a best-in-class underwriting platform, underwriting on behalf of 10 leading insurance companies because of the expertise that we have in underwriting wind risk for hurricane-exposed properties.
That is an income statement business. It is a high margin, high growth vehicle, especially when you look at the frequency of storms exhibited recently, as recent as this year, as well as last year. When you think of this growth rate, I think that it puts us on a wonderful path because we've been able to have a great history of organic growth as well as growth through acquisitions. We've acquired more than 100 businesses, and I mentioned with Regions, we retained more than 99.5% of the key associates. With Swett & Crawford, we retained 99% of the key associates. With the AmRisc American Coastal transaction, it was 100%. With the Crump transaction, it was more than 95%. Those are best-in-class numbers for our industry. This is something that we're really good at.
When you think about the diversification that we provide to BB&T Corporation, in 2007, we were 13% of BB&T's revenue. Today, we're 16%. I'm hopeful that we'll be an even more significant contributor in the years to come. If you think about the diversification of our business, in 2007, our wholesale business was only 30% of our insurance brokerage revenue. Our retail business was considerably more than double what our wholesale business was. Today, you see that our wholesale business is about half, it's grown significantly, and you see that we're better diversified across product categories. If you go back to 2007, we didn't even have life insurance, and today life insurance is 10% of our product mix. We've actively managed the diversification of this platform as we've grown it organically and grown it through acquisitions.
When I talk about being a resilient business, a big part of why this is a resilient business is because we are so well diversified, uniquely diversified in our industry. When you look at our capabilities, they're very broad. The specialties and practice groups that I list across the top of this slide are examples. They aren't the only ones that we do, but I wanted you to be able to picture the types of clients that we serve. We have expertise in these industry verticals so that we're able to truly advise those clients on the risks that they may or may not be aware of and how they can effectively address those risks. We have very broad product capabilities that you see in the boxes across the middle of this page.
Often when I talk to people in an introductory meeting, they'll say, "What kind of insurance do you do? Do you do life insurance?" Yes. "Do you do property insurance?" Yes. "Do you do casualty insurance?" Yes. "Do you do health insurance?" Yes. "Do you do title insurance?" Yes. "Do you do personal lines insurance?" Yes. We have very broad capabilities. Another thing that positions us uniquely in our industry is the breadth of clients that we serve. Everything from individuals all the way up to the largest, most sophisticated companies. That isn't common in our industry. Within our industry, firms tend to specialize within a certain type of clients. Having such a broad client set is another contributor to that resiliency that I mentioned.
If you look at our contribution to BB&T, when we showed the video and commented about the more than 5,000 clients that we're helping recover from Hurricane Florence and Hurricane Michael, I think that's one example of our contribution to BB&T because we're helping to make the world a better place to live. If you look at statistics, we help by providing income diversification to BB&T. We're not exposed to the same credit cycle as BB&T's lending businesses. We're not exposed to the same interest rate cycle as BB&T's other businesses. We provide a nice hedge and a nice balance. We're an area of growth. When you look at the insurance business cycle, I'll give you more information on that in a minute, but we can perform well in scenarios where lending businesses don't perform well. This is an income statement business.
It's not a balance sheet business, so we have very limited capital requirements. When you look at our product offerings, we're able to help. You've heard in Rufus's comments and Brant's comments and David's comments about the complementary nature of our businesses. All of their clients buy insurance somewhere. We can make it easier for them to purchase insurance. Very few people that I talk to say, "Hey, I'm really looking forward to going out and buying insurance." To the extent that we can make that process easier and that we can provide excellent support and service to them, it's a real value add, and it's a real demonstration of our client-first mentality. When I think about our new business within our retail segment for insurance, approximately 25% of that comes through BB&T's integrated relationship management program. That's leveraging the relationships that BB&T has across the enterprise.
Comment about the insurance industry cycle for a few minutes. The first thing that I'd point out to you is it's different than the interest rate cycle. It's different than the credit cycle. What it's largely related to are insurance loss scenarios because it's basic economics, supply and demand. There are reinsurance companies and insurance companies that have capital. When they have an abundance of capital, they're competing with each other to underwrite risks. It causes the price of that underwriting to decline. When capital is eroded through losses, that means there's less of it. It means that there's less competition for new business and prices tend to rise. If you go back historically, you see a very good example of a hard market in the early 2000s, and in insurance, we tend to refer to markets as being hard or soft.
When you think about the peak of that, look at the amplitude. It was very significant. You had better than 30% price increases. Then look at the duration of it. You had a multi-year period of time that you were in a hard market scenario, and then you went through a soft market. Again, look at the bottoms of those troughs and look at how long they lasted. One of the things that I think is a major change in insurance is what's happened with the insurance business cycle. When you think of hard and soft markets, they don't have the amplitudes that they had before. They don't go up as much, and they don't go down as much. They also don't last as long. The reason for that is there's other capital that is flowing into the insurance industry.
Some people call it alternative capital, some call it convergence capital. It comes from a variety of sources. Sometimes it's hedge funds, sometimes it's pension plans, sometimes it's institutional investors. What they're all doing is they've identified an asset class that isn't correlated with interest rates, isn't correlated with equity market returns, and by allocating a portion of their investments to the insurance asset class, they're able to move out on the efficient frontier and earn higher returns for their investors. That's attracted capital into the insurance business, which means that the law of supply and demand that I mentioned earlier is different today because you have more capital that flows into and out of the industry more easily than it did in the past. When I look at the insurance industry, it's a lot more stable than it was historically.
It's also a lot more resilient than it was historically. I mentioned earlier that I think market conditions are improving for us, that we have faced a headwind in recent years. If you look at this chart on the top part of the page, this is an index that reflects global insurance pricing. If you think from 2013 through 2017, insurance prices were decreasing, we were fighting through headwinds. Every renewal that we were doing, every piece of new business that we were placing, the prices were going down on. Since we're a commission and fee business, that means the commission and fees that we were collecting were going down. What you see happen in 2018 is you see that that turns the corner and that prices are beginning to rise. It's not a hard market like what we saw in the early 2000s.
If you look at prices increasing, it's probably around 2% on average, not terribly exciting, but it's nice to have a tailwind instead of the headwind that we've had to overcome for the past five years. The other thing that's nice is if you look at the red line on the bottom chart, you see that unemployment has been declining. You're all familiar with that. What you might not think about is that as businesses employ more people, they have to insure more people, they have to buy more insurance. If you look at the gray line on the bottom of this chart, you see that GDP has been accelerating. You're familiar with that as well. When GDP accelerates, it means that there's more construction. It means that there's more investment. It means that there's more trade. It means that there's more transportation.
It means that there's more to insure. When you think about the tailwinds that I'm describing in our business, we're insuring more economic activity, we're insuring more employees, and we're insuring them at higher prices. If you look at our performance through the cycles, I guess one thing that I would point out is that you see that our organic growth improved from 2016 to 2017, it's improved from 2017 to 2018, and it's improved sequentially in every quarter in 2018. I really like the momentum that I see in our business. You also see that we have a long-term history of outperforming the changes in rates. When you look at it and say, well, rates are increasing around 2% or so on average, we have a history of having a nice spread against that rate increase.
The organic growth that I mentioned is something that I'm particularly excited about. If you look at our third quarter results that we reported recently, we reported 6.7% organic growth. Our peer group reported an average of 4.8% organic growth, significant outperformance. If you look at it on a year-to-date basis, we're at 5%. Our peer group average is at 4.8%. As I mentioned, our organic growth has been accelerating each quarter of this year, I hope to see our organic growth rate for the full year continue to expand our lead against our peer group average. If you look at our performance as a business year to date, there's a fair amount of information on this slide, but what I would highlight for you is that we have strong performance on a broad basis across our business.
Our results aren't being driven by one part or two parts of this platform. If you look at our new business statistics, we're up 12% year-over-year. That's the best new business growth that we've seen in a very long time. Our retention is also very strong. When you have strong retention and you have strong new business, it leads to strong organic growth. That organic growth has allowed us to overcome a very significant headwind that we faced this year. We received profit commissions related to business that we've written in prior years. It's not related to activity that we do in the current year. Well, as you are well aware, there were significant storms last year that eroded profit commissions that we would have earned this year. That was about a $34 million revenue headwind that we had to overcome through organic growth.
You see from our non-interest income numbers that we were able to overcome that. Even more significantly, those profit commissions are very high margin. There's very little expense that goes against those profit commissions. Not only were we able to overcome them on a revenue basis, you see that from a margin standpoint, we were able to overcome the erosion of those profit commissions as well. I commented earlier on Regions Insurance, what a good fit that is. It's really a great combination. When you look at their producer profile, their client profile, the carriers that they work with, their geographic coverage, the systems that they use, it's a perfect fit with our retail business. As I mentioned, the conversions have gone very, very well. We've launched a transformation across insurance.
We've engaged consultants that have helped us put together a plan to further accelerate our organic growth and expand our margins. We have more than 30 initiatives across insurance in our retail business, in our wholesale business, in our life insurance business that have specific activities, specific roadmaps, specific ownership that we believe will lead to higher organic growth, higher margins, which will translate into higher earnings for BB&T shareholders. You see some of those key bullet points mentioned here. When I think about the overall strategy, in addition to higher organic growth and higher margins, it's that we want this insurance broker to be dynamic. It is a world-class platform. We want it to have the flexibility to be able to compete with our peer group. Through that, we have really evolved the governance relationships with BB&T, recognizing that this isn't a balance sheet business.
It isn't a credit business. It's a commission and fee income statement business. We have the ability to continue to leverage BB&T's scale and services so that we're, in my opinion, well ahead of our peer group in terms of things like cybersecurity, in terms of things like data centers and disaster recovery plans. I think that the robust nature of those things at BB&T is a real advantage for our business and for our clients. One of the things that we're focusing on in this transformation is data and analytics. I wanted to take a minute, and I'll be quick, to share with you a couple of examples of what we're doing there, because a lot of people talk about data and analytics, but unless you have a really clear idea of what you're doing, you may not get any value from it.
We have a pretty good idea of what we're doing. This example is from CRC, our wholesale property and casualty business. If you look at the traditional model for the wholesale property and casualty business, it was very transactional. You would have a retail broker that would have a relationship with a wholesale broker that would have a relationship with an underwriter at an insurance carrier. Based on those relationships, they would be able to place coverage for an insured. A very transactional business model. What we have done, and we're considered the industry leader in this space, is several years ago, we began to capture the data on all of the placements that we make. Today, we have 280,000 total policy records, $17 trillion of total insured value, $6.5 trillion of gross sales, 1.6 million locations, 40,000 loss records that's in our data warehouse.
We're able to take that information, we're able to share it with insurance carrier partners so that they're able to more efficiently quote on risk. They're able to price better because they have better information. We're able to share that information with the retail clients of CRC. We provide benchmarking solutions to our clients. We provide an analyzer to CRC's retail clients so that they can more efficiently manage their business. We're able to efficiently place small business. That's a challenge that the industry's had for a long time. We, in fact, quote more than a million small business accounts a year. That's another unique space that we're in. In summary, I said that there were four things that I hoped you would take away from this presentation.
The first is not only are we big, sure, we're the fifth largest insurance broker in the world, but we're unique. We're differentiated. We're very different than the other insurance brokers that you saw in that league table. Our environment's improving. We're going from having headwinds to having tailwinds. We've got a transformation underway to really improve earnings. This is a client-first business. It's focused on growth. I think it's a very powerful, unique, resilient platform. Thank you very much for your time today. I'd like to introduce Barbara Duck.
[Presentation]
Good morning. I'm Barbara Duck. I'm our Chief Information Officer for BB&T. On behalf of our executive management team, again, we appreciate so much you all being here today, and I hope that you've had an opportunity to visit some of the kiosks that we have available to you. This is just one example of some of the things that we're doing, both in the financial insights area, as well as some of the automation that we have throughout our company. We have great individuals to share some of those success stories with you out and available. Well, I want to talk to you this morning about transformation in technology and some of the things that we are doing to prepare for our digital future.
I think each of our executive managers who've spoken to you already today have done a great job of really setting up the opportunity for why it's important for us to transform our technology operations at BB&T. One of the things that I think is important is to recognize the great job that our teams are already doing. Chris spoke to you this morning about some of the major accomplishments that we've made as an organization since the last time we met at an investor day. When he did that, he shared with you a lot of accomplishments that had technology intermingled with those. Things like our U platform, the implementation of our commercial lending system that we call CLIP. You also heard about the data center and the new installation there, as well as you also heard about our general ledger platform.
All areas where our technology associates were heavily involved in making those such a success. Sprinkled throughout the presentations that you've heard this morning, you've heard about the importance of our technology future and where we're headed. You've heard many executives talk about the importance of the future of the digital transformation that we need to make and how we need to embed that together. It is really more important now than it has ever been for us as a technology organization to be uniquely aligned to our business partners. Let me tell you how we're going to do a transformation in technology. Four key takeaways that I would share with you today as we walk through this presentation.
One, we want to talk about our transformation in technology and how that is driving cost optimization in our business, how we are actually taking cost out to reinvest in these important opportunities. The second area I want to describe to you is our new business model and the way that we're working with our business partners to be tightly aligned. The third area that we want to cover and focus on is to talk about automation, lean process improvements, and other things that we're doing in the technology area to make our business easier to do business with and more efficient. Lastly, we want to talk about how we're fortifying our cyber defenses and other things to make sure that we protect the assets of both our clients as well as our company.
We started on a journey called transformation in technology about this time last year. We've been on this journey for about a year, and we've got about another year to go. In that process, one of the things that we felt was very important for our associates to have is a connection, not only to the vision and the mission of our organization, but also a connection to how we, as data and technology services associates, would help that vision and mission of our corporation come to life. We put together really a tagline or a vision for our associates that's listed for you here.
It says, "Enabling tomorrow today." You might look at that and say, "Well, that's very short, it's very simple." It is, but it's also very memorable, and it leaves for our associates every day a challenge for them that they need to achieve and accomplish. The first word, I think, is very powerful for us as data and technology services associates, and that's all about enablement. How do we enable all of that business change that you saw on the previous slides and with the previous presenters? How do we enable that to actually come to life? It's one thing to dream it's another thing to build it and make it happen, and that is what we are partnering to do.
The last two elements of the way we describe this when we talk about enabling tomorrow today is really about how do we pull forward those dreams and goals and hopes and life that we want to provide to our clients in the future and execute on those as rapidly as possible to deliver that value to the client sooner. You can see here our mission is really about providing superior value to all of our constituents in our mission statement and making sure that we do that by creating a distinctive wow experience. I'll just pause on that just for a minute. Again, it sounds maybe simplistic to say we're going to create a wow experience, but I would challenge you to think about your own life and what you do every day. Each of you have a device of some kind.
Many of you have multiple devices of many kinds with you today. They enable you to do what you do in life. They enable you to do your job. They enable you to connect with your family. They enable you to create the experiences that you need to provide. I doubt you go home at night thinking about, what's my bank going to do for me today through their great website and application? What you do think about is, what experience am I trying to provide to my family, to my friends, to myself, and how am I going to make that possible? We are trying to create engaging and dynamic platforms that will provide you and others like you that are clients the ability to do that and live your life in a way that was so eloquently described in the commercial that Brant showed you earlier.
As we're trying to create this wow experience, one of the things that we felt it was important to do was really vision out the horizons and the impacts that we expect to see from a technology perspective. There's three important horizons that we are focused on. The first one that you see here is around stability and risk management. This is all about ensuring that our platforms as well as our systems have strong production stability, as well as making sure that for large project implementations, that we do those in a coordinated fashion, a timely fashion, and executed with precision. The second horizon that you see here is really about setting the foundation for the future.
It's about our infrastructure and our applications and making sure that they're scalable, that they're flexible, that they can be adaptable to change at the rapid speed that you heard Kelly describe last night and you've also heard others describe today. The third horizon that you see here is about enabling our company to really stay at the forefront of our industry. It is critical for us to be able to compete to make sure that we can provide those technology services that our clients and our lines of business need to make sure that they are successful. In our transformation and technology program, we have several opportunities to make sure that we not only change the technology business, but we also give the opportunity to do continued investment in digital transformation. I'm going to describe to you in our short time before lunch four primary areas.
We're going to talk about cost optimization, we'll talk about our new business model, we'll talk about our new delivery model, we'll spend a few minutes talking about Lean and process automation. Underlying those from a foundational component are two primary areas. One is all about data and the importance of data and what we're doing in that area, and also our continued focus on cybersecurity. It is really a component of all of these things, the aggregation of these six items, that will give us the results that we're looking for, which is all around having a more technology-enabled business. Where did we start? In the December timeframe of last year, we partnered with McKinsey & Company to assist us in looking at the cost within our technology organization.
We did a baseline compared to peers and other technology organizations to see where we were doing a good job, a great job, and areas that we might need to improve upon. It was really those foundational elements that we went through that leveraged for us then an opportunity over the next year to partner again with McKinsey & Company to say, how do we take advantage of the things that we're already doing very well, how do we also take cost out of our business to make sure that we can reinvest those things to drive digital transformation? You'll see that we did this baseline component, we began to do the hard work of implementing those changes. One of the key primary areas that we have been focusing on is called workforce management, or what we would also call smart sourcing.
Over 40%-50% of the cost that is in our technology organization is all about the people that we have. It's around the workforce we have, the associates we have, and the outside labor, whether that be contract or whether it be outside offshore professionals that help us get work done. It is important that we examine that and make sure that we have very crisp processes to make sure that we align the right people at the right time to accomplish the objectives that we have as an organization. Then we are looking at how do we scale up for the future. Again, this is about how we look at making sure that we process optimize our business. This is a component that we are heavily engaged at the current moment, and I'll give you a few examples of that shortly.
Let me describe for you our new business model. We felt it was more important now than ever to closely align to our businesses to make sure that we can deliver. We aligned in the first half of this year, we designated business information officers. Think of those as mini CIOs that are aligned to the businesses that you've heard present today. The six that you see up on the left-hand side of this chart show you things from everything from our digital services and marketing teams all the way through our financial services group. We are aligned to them. What does that really mean? It means that those mini CIOs or BIOs that we have in our organization now have organization alignment.
Instead of being aligned in a very siloed way, which is traditional for IT or technology shops where you might have security, infrastructure, application development and maintenance and support. We've brought all of those resources and aligned them directly to the businesses. Think of them as a mini Agile team put together, working around a table, so to speak, together to support Rufus, for example, or Brant, so that when they have an idea that they want to bring to life, we can come together as a technology partner and make sure that we deliver on that from end to end in the fastest way that we can do that. It really does make it easier to do business with us, and it makes it faster to deliver on products.
I was actually talking to one of our clients, meaning one of our associates that runs one of our businesses, just a few weeks ago, and he used words like amazing, great experience, and I could not be delivering to my clients today the things that I'm delivering without this new organizational structure where I have someone who is aligned to my business. It gives them much more of a feel of being in a small business environment where their technology partners are embedded with them every day, focused on their objectives and getting it done. Those teams are certainly supported by a strong shared services organization. It is not enough to be aligned just from a business information officer perspective. It is critically important not only that we be aligned correctly, but we have a delivery model that can support that fast delivery system.
We have engaged in a process to help bring to each of those business information officers the ability to do software development in an Agile way, also to bring DevOps to them, as well as infrastructure as a service. Think of this obviously as the ability to deliver software either in an internal cloud, external cloud, public cloud environment. It is making those applications have the ability to deliver in that way. When we think about Agile, we think about it is all about discovering the right thing at the end of the day. It is about taking those big ideas that our lines of businesses have and break them down into what we call little big ideas, and taking those little big ideas and actually being able to deliver on them faster.
At the end of the day, our digital transformation is really all about the delivery of software. If you do not have code designed to do what you need to do and be able to deliver it quickly, you cannot get to the U by BB&T mobile app that you saw earlier. You cannot get to enhancements in the new platform for our wealth clients. We have to be able to deliver the software code in quick, reliable increments, and that is what Agile does for us. Agile alone is not enough. It is not about just discovering the right thing. It is also about the ability to deliver the right thing, and we do that through DevOps and infrastructure as a service.
It is about taking the things that you see, the software code that has been delivered, and making sure that we can do frequent delivery of that software code through automated pipelines that are secure and stable. This gives us not only the ability to deliver faster, but we have risk mitigation in the process, reducing the number of touches and reducing the number of errors that could be in that particular product, which means that we can deliver faster to our clients. We have talked about taking cost out of the business. We have talked about a new business model. We talked about a new delivery model, and all of those things are critically important.
At the end of the day, if we do not change the processes within which our teams work to make sure that those processes are streamlined and make sure that they are effective, it is very difficult to get work done. You should really think of a technology shop as a very large factory, and each of you, if you had an order that you wanted to provide to me to get work done, you would all bring me that order in various ways. Let us say that you put them in front of the stage here, and you would say, "We need for you to get this work done." I need a way that I can bring that work in, organize it very effectively, and make sure that I see that it goes through a factory in a timely fashion.
You don't want the product to stop at one place and build up, or it won't be able to continue, and you don't really get any value out of the technology shop until you can deliver the product on the other end to touch either the associate or the client to make the process better. The process optimization work that we are embarking on is critically important for our organization. We are embedding Lean experts within all of our teams so that this will be a constant re-improvement and reinvention process that we will be able to do on an ongoing basis. There's a lot of different things on this slide that talk about the different areas that we are going to focus on and where we're going to do process improvement. Let me just give you one example of where we're working currently.
In each of our development areas, we have both application maintenance as well as application development teams. We have gone in and worked with one of those teams to do some initial Lean process work to improve the visibility of the work and how the work will actually flow through the process. In doing that, we have found that we can get an increase of 10%-15% additional work throughput through those teams. We think that's critically important for our future because it gives us the ability to deliver faster and actually deliver more work to our lines of businesses so that we can actually do this digital transformation that you have been hearing about. On the foundation of all those things that I've laid out for you are two additional items I'd like to share with you.
One is around data, and the other is cyber. Data is the way of the future. We have to have strong data elements that we can deliver to our businesses. You heard John just speak about data and how important that is to his business. Data has always been something we've been good at, but data is something that we need to be great at. If you see here some of the things that we have from a data strategy perspective, we have goals to automate everything around our data.
The more it's automated, the faster it's available, the more likely we can give to our business partners real-time information for them to be able to execute on, whether that is delivering on a client so that they can have a needs analysis, and we can get them the next best product or delivering on a report or information so that we can do collections faster. Whatever it might be, it is important for us to make sure that we are automating the data that we have. The second component that we want to do is make sure that we democratize that data. We need to make it available for our teams. We need to make it readily in their hands so that they can slice and dice it, analyze it, and execute on it. They don't need to wait in line for someone to run them a report.
Lastly, in the data space, we need to make sure that we optimize the operations that we have, making sure that we have a very streamlined process to make sure that we are delivering quickly on the data information. Cybersecurity is also a very important component for us to deliver on and continue to make investments in. Our team, in particular, Kelly, has been very outspoken in regards to cyber and the importance of making sure that we are protecting our financial institution as well as making sure that we're protecting our clients. We've continued to invest in this area, and over the next few years, you'll continue to see investments in this space, in particular, on these 3 items. One is making sure that we are focused on access control and making sure that that access control is tightly controlled.
It is very important to make sure that you are protecting your most important information from a privileged access as well as who else can get access to that information. Lastly, we want to make sure that we're focused on capability acceleration, in particular, focusing on fortifying our cyber defenses and protections. And lastly, we want to make sure that we're focusing on ensuring that we have the right skills and talents to make sure that we can continue the development and growth in the cyber capabilities that we have within our organization. This shows you a quick look at what our cyber investments have looked like over the past few years. It shows you a growth in our expenses here from around $23 million to over $100 million in investments, both baseline and projects across the different teams.
I will also add that we have investments in other parts of our business that may not show up here when you think about infrastructure around firewalls and those types of things. Those things would be listed separately. The number is actually higher than what you see here. You also see the investments in our staffing going from 50 associates back in the 2009 timeframe to over 269 associates that we'll have at the end of 2018. A critical area for us to continue to invest and make sure that we have the protections that we need. One of the last things I want to share with you is about where do we focus and invest from a technology perspective with our financial dollars. We've been given here about $1.1 billion to invest across our technology organization.
It's critical for us to make sure in that investment realm that we do absolutely the best investment across that and optimization of those dollars as we can. You'll see a good portion of our dollars is in what we call infrastructure spending, about 61%. These are the things that you think of as lights on, doors open, production types of things that we do to run our business. You'll see that we have about 20% of our dollars are invested in innovation and innovative projects that we are working on, and then an additional 14% on other types of important fundamental portfolio projects that we have across the organization.
In summary, I would just like to close with saying you can see how critically important it is for our organization to make sure that we have a technology organization that can enable our business, ensuring again, that we take the cost out where appropriate to reinvest from a digital standpoint, making sure that we have a strong business support model for our lines of businesses, ensuring that we have cost optimization and Lean process automation across the teams, and lastly, making sure that we are continuing to invest from a cybersecurity standpoint. I thank you for your time this morning. I'm now going to turn it over to Rich to give you instructions for the rest of the afternoon.
Just a quick announcement. Because of the flight delays yesterday, we've made arrangements for those of you that were not able to make it to the tour of the BB&T Leadership Institute. This afternoon when we're done with our session, we will have shuttles taking you to the airport, but there is going to be a shuttle at 3:15 P.M. that's going to take you to the BB&T Leadership Institute, allow you the time to take the tour, and then from there, take you right to the airport. If you look at your schedules, you'll see tour shuttles going at 3:15 P.M. and 3:45 P.M. to the airport. Those are still in place, but there will be another shuttle that will take you to the BB&T Leadership Institute and then on to the airport.
At this time, we're going to break for lunch, and a member of our executive management team is going to be seated at each one of the tables. Their name will be on the table. This is going to give you an opportunity, if you have specific topics you want to discuss, to sit with that executive. Our team out the door there is going to direct you to where we're going to have our plated lunch. We've added about 15 minutes of time to lunch to allow you more time to look at the exhibits. We're going to begin the afternoon session promptly at 12:45 P.M. See you then.
Well, good afternoon, everybody. Dontá Wilson, happy to be with you all today to talk about client centricity. What is client centricity? Client centricity is an energy. It's a passion. It's a deep commitment and focus on the client. It's not about just putting the client first, but it's really about putting the client at the center of everything that we do. Today I'm going to talk to you all about four strategic deployments that we have going on to create client centricity. Embedded in those four strategic strategies that we're deploying, there's four key takeaways. One of the first key takeaways is that we're creating a client-centric client experience of distinction. Number 2, we're inspired by the Voice of the Client and inspired by the data that we're receiving to make better decisions to assist our clients in their financial dreams.
Number 3, we're empowered by dynamic technology. Number 4 is how we're growing digital accounts and digital revenue. The four strategic areas that we're focused on right now are, 1, our enterprise Voice of the Client program, 2, our insights-driven client experience, which is super important for us. I'm going to share today with you some revolutionary marketing things that we are deploying that are really, really working for us in a major way. We're going to talk a little bit about digital transformation, give you an update on where we are, and a little bit of vision casting so you can see where we're going. I get the chance to wake up every day to work with a group of very passionate and really client-obsessed, I mean, absolutely obsessed associates around creating client distinction.
These burgundy hexagons represent those teammates that do this every day, working side by side with our business segment partners to do a couple of things. 1, to bring client insights, 2, to co-develop strategy, and 3, to aid in execution. Let's talk about how we're doing that together with our business segment partners. The Voice of the Client program. What we really believe is that if you want to elevate your game to really be a leader, continue to be a leader in client experience, you have to move beyond just syndicated studies and benchmarks. It is great to see where you stack up against your peers, which is very, very valuable, but it's even more important to know how do your clients feel about you. Your peers don't bring you accounts. Your clients bring you accounts.
For us, when we move beyond client benchmarking and syndications, it's about really getting more robust feedback information directly from our clients. In 2018, we rolled out an enterprise-wide Voice of the Client digital platform to enable us to do that. It's multi-channel and multi lines of business where we get near real-time feedback from our clients that are doing business with us. What that enables us to do is that we're able to get information and be able to coach our associates in a very valuable way. We're able to push a button. Right now, I can push a button on my iPad or iPhone and tell you what our overall satisfaction scores are at the bank level. I can tell you what it is at the regional level.
I can tell you what it is at the branch level, at a mortgage loan officer level, or at a branch bank level. We have very valuable feedback that gives us information so we continuously are able to improve our overall client experience. How are we using the Voice of the Client program today? There's a couple of things we're doing. We're able to identify our clients near real-time that are at risk. If they give us bad feedback on one of the surveys that we present to them through their mobile device or through the telephone, we have a client delight team that calls them immediately to try to solve for that particular issue. We're also very focused on reading and understanding all the verbatim comments. Because when you just check a box around what your problem is, you might not get to the root cause.
We're using text analytics to get at what the real root cause of the problems are so that we can correct them. We're using really good linkage analysis, where we're taking performance metrics and we're taking client metrics and making better business decisions. We're also using, as I mentioned, the Voice of the Client information to coach. When an associate's doing a good job, we're able to high-five and say, "That's a really, really good job," to reinforce a great behavior. If they didn't do a good job, it gives the opportunity to come up with a coaching plan to improve it so they can do a better job on the next experience. Equally important, we're looking at the trends and evaluating the trends that we're seeing happening across our multiple lines, our multiple lines of business, so we can make real-time correction.
Once you know what your trends are, you know what your systemic problems may be potentially across your lines of businesses and across your channels, you have to do something about it. What we did, we launched this group called the Client First Solutions Team. It's basically a problem-solving SWAT team. This is a group of team that's a cross-functional team that work together in an Agile way to eliminate client friction and client effort in near real-time as possible. They meet every couple of weeks, and every month, we make decisions to improve the business and to improve the client experience for our particular clients within BB&T. There's three primary things that they work on. One, they work on items related to policy. Second, items related to process, and three, items related to products.
From a policy perspective, we've done things such as enhance our authorities within our local community bank, so that the people that are working directly with the client can respond a lot quicker. From a process perspective, we've done things like introduce intelligent automations to our hold process so we can have more accurate, more speedy responses and client-friendly hold scenarios without introducing any risk. You'll see here on this deck that we reduced the holds within the first two weeks, 67%, by having an intelligent automation system aid our human associates that are in our branches. Third, we've done things related to products such as our ClickView. One of the main reasons our clients would call was when they had an overdraft.
They'd call our care centers or call our branches because they didn't understand the sequence of what caused their overdraft. Now we have available to our clients, we developed this in a couple of months, the ability to be able to push on their iPhone and touch the overdraft and in sequential order, be able to tell what caused that overdraft. These are the type of things that we're bringing to our client experience to elevate it on a continual basis. We've introduced 33 of these year to date, which have all been phenomenal, and they're making a big difference in our business. Let's take a look at the big difference that it's making in our business, having a complete all-in client focus opportunity here. We've got two things that we're measuring in our Voice of the Client program. One is the Net Promoter Score.
Our Net Promoter Score, if you look at the chart to the left, what it is, you take the clients that give you top box scores, so that's 9s or 10s, as it relates to would you recommend this to a friend of a colleague. Then you subtract or the delta out of the detractors. Those that give you a 6 or less. You'll see in the month of September, we had 70% of folks gave us a 9 or a 10, then we had 11% give us a 6 or below. That delta is a 59. What we've seen is that although we already had good Net Promoter Score, we've been able to improve that score with this type of focus on our clients year-to-date. That's really, really impressive.
In relation to Net Promoter Score, I know that you all follow that, but just for those that may not follow as closely, the Net Promoter Score is on a -100 to a +100 scale. If you get a 1, that's considered good. You get a 50, it's considered excellent. For us to have these type of scores, we're really excited about that and looking to continue to improve that over time. When you look at the overall satisfaction score, overall satisfaction score just basically says your overall experience, your omni experience, how satisfied are you with BB&T? We started the program as early as February. We were already at 68% of folks giving us a 9 or a 10. You all know how tough it is to get a 9 or a 10, a perfect 10, as it relates to anything.
They're saying we were at a 9 or 10 at 68%. We've improved that number year-to-date and have our highest scores yet at a 73%. We're very excited that both of these opportunities allow us to continue to elevate our game as it relates to client experience. It's also making a big difference in our book of business. When we look at our attrition numbers and look at gross attrition year-over-year, we're down 4% on gross attrition. It's making a significant difference to our business and having business results, which create revenue recapture opportunities for us. Let's talk a little bit about being an insights-driven client experience-discipline organization, which is super important. What we're doing, you hear a lot of talk about data analytics. It's a popular buzzword.
Definitionally, if you're doing data analytics, you're looking at past behavior and using that past behavior, you're really trying to do some predictive modeling in most cases to try to create a better outcome for your client. We're really trying to move from, and have already begun the process of moving from data analytics to really data synthesis, so that you can be near real-time as possible. We want to make sure that we're taking this, what we call rich data and turning it into wealthy data. Data that can really have an opportunity to create a solution for a client as soon as we can for that particular client. A couple of things that we're doing. If you take a look at this slide here, you'll see that we've launched a client data lake. Client data lake for us is a centralized repository for data.
It's a data processing tool in which we're able to take from hundreds of sources all the data we have on our clients, be it transactional, be it behavior, be it third party, and put it in one place so we can create a better experience for our client. We're able to offer near real-time information to the right client at the right time, the right information with the right channel. Just to give you an example of it, the difference between data synthesis and data analytics. If you use a data analytics type model and you're doing marketing, you may have took a group of clients that had these opportunities, and they modeled that they would be great credit card leads.
By the time you go send that email and use your e-automation to market to those clients, what if yesterday they called and had a client complain in your care center? Would they be really excited about getting an email about a credit card? Probably not. What your data lake allows you to do is embed that client feedback so real-time, if it says, "We just had a call about a concern around client service," instead of that lead going through and you marketing to that client, it would trigger maybe someone from a Virtual Banking Center to call, and it triggers someone from maybe one of our branches to call. The same thing would be true if we had a credit card lead for that same group of folks, and that day they put $1 million of deposits into our banking system.
Instead of sending that credit card, what would happen near real-time is intelligent automation would tee you up that the most likely best call at the moment is probably to one of our wealth advisors or someone that can help them with that deposit they just made versus a credit card. That's what the data lake would empower us to do, is be able to have near real-time opportunities and solutions for our clients. There's a lot of other things we're doing as it relates to insights analytics. I'll just call out one here that's listed, which is around our analytics and predictive modeling, really using machine learning to offer what we call the next best action.
Our branch bankers and our market leaders today in the branches, when they walk in, we're able to provide to them their client base and have a top six in order of what is the best conversation to have next with your client. We're also doing this and in the works of rolling this out for our commercial business as well. Our officers now can have call efficiency as it relates to prioritization of who should I call next and when should I call them. We're doing data analytics and data synthesis and talking directly to clients, but we're also enabling our officers to be able to have better call prioritization so we get the best of both worlds. Let's take a look at some things we're doing as it relates to revolutionary marketing. There isn't a better time to be a marketer than it is today.
The four Ps of marketing have not changed. What has changed is the dynamic inputs that go into the four Ps, and how do you apply the four Ps in a more digital environment? We're super excited to see the progress that we're making as it relates to understanding that, and really it's a game changer for us. At the end of the day, those that can do this best are going to have the best opportunities to create future revenue. I want to share with you what we believe is our ultimate client experience as it relates to marketing. This is a vision that we casted two years ago.
A vision of going from one-way communication, where we just put up a billboard and hope someone reads it, or we just send them a brochure and hope that we sent it to the right people, to really trying to engage in a client's life, have a full integration where we're responding and talking to the client simultaneously based on their behaviors, based on their transactions, based on what they're doing with the website, and we're serving up content at their particular convenience. What I want to do is show you this vision that we've casted and that we've been working on through Lisa.
You'll see Lisa have a series of communications with us and us have a series of communications with Lisa, and at the end of the day, how many solutions she selects at the convenience of her phone without even having to come into the branch. This is what we're calling Always On. This is our North Star, where you see the two-way communication. We're fully integrated into Lisa's life. She got a credit line increase. She got a pre-approval on our mortgage opportunity. We gave her some traveling tips. We also were able to offer a free insurance quote so that she can make her complete transaction or move more successful. That's our vision. As you all know, vision without execution is hallucination. Let me just tell you what we've done so far.
We've moved from traditional marketing, where when we had this vision, we were just one-way communication, to we're about middle of the road where we're doing more solution-based, more triggers and activities. If someone uses Venmo today, by tomorrow, we can send them an email because it's going to trigger to them to send them an opportunity to try out our Zelle opportunity. When we unlock the potential of the data lake, when it's fully stood up, which is in process of being stood up today, in 2019, it'll be fully stood up. We'll be able to have full convergence where we can have the right message at the right time. And that is the real game changer. We're making lots of good progress. The teams are working really, really hard.
Let me just show you some of the progress they've been making year to date, well, since 2015. I'd like to direct your eyes to the first bullet point in each of the years. In 2015, we executed on 108 campaigns. If you look at 2018, we have executed or would have executed on 332 campaigns. Significant increase in activity. Look at emails. We first started with email automation back in 2015, 3.2 million emails that we sent out to touch our clients. Year to date, we've already sent out 63 million emails to touch our clients. Even direct mail, still have direct mail solutions. Direct mail, we've sent out 3.4 million email pieces. We would've sent 18 million email pieces by the end of this year. Dramatic increase in activity. I'd like to call out a couple things.
In 2017, you heard Chris talk about earlier where we had a brand refresher, where we reintroduced the new tagline, All we see is you. Just really letting the world know that we are very much focused on being client-centric, that they are the most important piece of our business. They are our why, in addition to making the world a much better place to live. I'd like to also call out in 2018 that we've launched a campaign. It's a five-year campaign, and we call it Knight. We've already brought in 46,000 new-to-bank households. We look at those new-to-bank households, which is phenomenal, because I know you all have been asking some of the questions around, well, what is your CPA, your cost per acquisition? You see folks in the marketplace with $500 incentives.
We've been able to move this business with $130 type of incentive on average when you look at the blend. We're doing much better with our spend, much more smarter, better techniques to be able to move over these type of households. We're getting good account growth from that, so we're super excited about that. We're also getting youthful account growth. When you look at our new-to-bank clients, the average age of our new-to-bank clients, the median is 34 years old. The mode age, which is the most popular, is 18. If we look at the future of the business and you see that we're bringing in that type of client base, that's going to really fare well for us in the future.
Another thing I'd like to call out here is the 10 Always On campaigns we've already deployed, there'll be thousands of those, but we've already got those up and running, and there's often great benefit to us. The last thing would be the returns that we're getting on marketing. We're getting a two to one from a revenue to expense ratio on our marketing. The reason why that's unlocking that particular opportunity is because you have the digital, which is much more efficient and allows you to do that. We still do a good deal of traditional marketing because traditional marketing will always be important. That's kind of how you build your brand awareness so people can know who you are. They have to know who you are before you can actually do something digitally where they could take action.
We are doing things like billboards, and we are also doing TV. What we find in our marketing cocktails where we have traditional marketing and digital marketing, we are seeing up to two times more success rate in responses in those marketplaces. The perfect opportunity to have the right cocktail. That being said, digital marketing is where it's at. I want to congratulate Barbara Duck and her team with the website optimization. We have responsive designs, which you see on your desktop, you see on your mobile device, and you also see on your iPad, which is important. We also have accessibility design, which allows us, if we have clients that are visually impaired, we can allow them to also enjoy quality banking. Our social media game has really picked up.
We've had three times more social media followers than we started off with in 2015. We're doing a lot in that particular area. Our search engine marketing has really took off. We have great results from that. We've always had search engine optimization, we really never did do search engine marketing. That's where you go out, and you go and broker words. It's a blind brokerage, you might choose the word Winston-Salem, you might choose banking, you might choose student. Someone else is in the marketplace. We put $50 on each word. Someone else put $100 on each word, and they're going to show up on our front page. We were showing up on no page, on page eight, on page nine. How many of y'all ever bought something on page eight or nine? It just does not happen, right?
You have to be on the front page, and because we're active with that and doing it very effectively, we're getting great results. Our email marketing, our e-automation, we said 63 million emails sent. You look at how much do you have to spend to be successful? Can you spend enough to be really, really good at this business? We're showing that, we're demonstrating that our response rates, our click-through rates, open rates are at 27%, and the industry is at 21%. Again, it's about your technique and your skill in addition to being present. At the end of the day, content is still king. You can have parity with technology, you can have parity with technique, who can send the most relevant content to get a client to respond?
You saw some of those responses, or you heard about those responses or impressions when Brant mentioned earlier from one of our emotional-led campaigns, which is a client journey type campaign, showing clients how the products fit in their life. We also have brand campaigns. We also have product features. It's not good enough just to have the products. You have to tell the world what products that you have. We have one of my favorite, which is brand journalism, which is really talking to the good work you do in your community. As you know, millennials and Gen Z, they really value the difference that you make in your community when they're selecting partners for business. I wanted to show you a couple of these commercials. You already seen one, take a look at our brand commercial, which really focuses in on client centricity.
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That's really designed to reemphasize our attention to our client, the client centricity. This next one is really one of my favorites, we're on our 10-year anniversary of our BB&T Lighthouse Project. We've touched 16 million lives, this is just a way to tell that story to the marketplace, which is called brand journalism.
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It's really easy to be a marketer or be in brand journalism when you have real associates making a difference. That's our associates making a difference in the community, we wanted to share it with the world. Let's talk digital transformation. Digital transformation is really, really important. Digital transformation takes great strategy, what we want to do is to give you some insight to let you see how we see the world. Just take a look at our lens on what digital transformation really is. For us, digital transformation can be summed up into four Is. The first one is inspire. We want to inspire our associates to create client distinction. The second one is about innovate. We want to innovate with client centricity and operation efficiency as the priority. The third is around invest.
We want to invest for the future, but we want to invest now. The pace of change has been as fast as we've ever known it, but it's forward-looking. Tomorrow will be as slow, today will be as slow as we ever know it. Each day it gets faster. We want to ignite. That we want to make sure we're doing things that will ignite and ultimately generate household growth and also revenue growth. Let's talk about inspire. We're inspired from three different categories. One, we're inspired from our clients. We talked about the Voice of the Client program and other feedback. We want to build and transform based on what your clients want, not just for transforming just to transform. The second is associate inspire.
We have groups like our Client First Solutions team, and other associates gives us feedback because they're dealing with the client on a daily basis. We take that feedback, and we try to respond and build things for our clients based on that feedback. The third is co-inspire, where we co-create the solutions with our clients, which I think is one of the most meaningful ways to be able to build a business. This is an example of co-creation. A couple things that we do as it relates to our digital platform. We have feedback that we get. We have over 41,000 pieces of feedback that we may get from the Apple rating store or Android rating store, the CEO line, social media. We take that into consideration.
We get feedback from the platforms whenever someone opens up an account on one of our online application platforms, we get immediate feedback. We get 62,000 of those that we've had in 2018. We do benchmark performance evaluation. We want to make sure that when we change something, we're actually improving the process. Most recently, with our pre-qualification application and mortgages, we're able to reduce, in study, we're able to reduce and shave off nine minutes out of that process. If we can't improve the performance, we don't create the change. We try to track and study all the things so we make sure we're making a difference in someone's life. As it relates to digital future experience, we do a couple things. One, we have a digital community, 2,000 of our clients.
We've had 29,000 sessions with clients where we give them a chance to give us feedback based on the usability assessments or asking them survey questions about what we're building. We also have usability testing, where we bring clients in and we have sessions. You'll see we have 150 sessions where they interact with our prototype, and we get to watch them and interact with them to see and make sure we're building the right thing. The third, we have the beta testing, where we allow clients to be able to test the product before it goes public. I kind of call this mama's kitchen because it reminds me of being in the kitchen with mom on Thanksgiving when she's making cake, and she'll give you a little bit of the cake batter and say, "How does it taste?
Does it add a little more sugar?" She add a little more sugar. "How does it taste?" When the cake comes out, the cake was perfect because she got feedback along the way. I call this our mama's kitchen approach, but it's important so that we don't develop product without knowing that the client would actually want it or actually use it. When you look at how we innovate, we do innovation in two different forms. One is internal innovation. We launched a test and learn team. Our test and learn team, they do proof of concepts. One of those we were successful with this year was our chatbot. We tested that with our care centers and our branches, and we'll be moving to deployment in 2019 with a use case for that.
We also had a hackathon in July where we had 63 of our associates come in, they had a hackathon and really creating an innovation culture there so we could see what ideas they have. That was successful. We do external things such as sponsorships of accelerators and incubators fintechs, because you have to be where innovation is. That also has led to us launching under Bennett Bradley's leadership, our BB&T Ventures, which is our arm that is designed to invest in and/or acquire digital emerging technology. We made our first investment in September in a data as a service company called Enigma. You all probably read about that, they're already out offering real value to us that we're benefiting from. We're going to continue to accelerate and bring in innovative talent.
We're going to continue to accelerate our fintech investment, we're going to form more alliances in order to help this transformation go a lot quicker in the future. Our investment themes are here as follows. We're investing with a purpose, things that help client experience, marketing, data analytics, commerce, faster payments, intelligent automation, digital capabilities, or innovation. Those are the themes of investment that we're looking to invest in. We have accelerated our digital investments. From 2017 through 2019, we would have spent $300 million as it relates to digital acceleration. We have 20 strategic projects that encompasses things like our platforms. We have things like our digital marketing tools that we're using. We're making these big strategic investments. If you look at 2018, we're also doing things that also our firm values, not considered strategic projects.
We had 1,500 digital platform releases in one year. We're learning and iteratively changing and making a difference in clients' lives kind of real time. We talked about the up to $50 million fintech investment that we've committed to make. If we look at our performance, what are the results out of this? Because the metrics matter. What are you doing to actually grow the business? If you look from a digital opportunity, if you look at your top left-hand side and you look at the retail checking, what that pie chart represents is total checking, the 15%, the slice represents out of all of the checking accounts that are open at BB&T, 15% are opened through digital acquisition. If you look at the arrow beneath that, shows that we had a 24% year-over-year growth in digital acquisition, which is phenomenal.
If you look at business checking, it represents 7% of all of our checking accounts that we're opening are open online. 36% increase year-over-year, which is also phenomenal. You look at bank card, we're having great success there. It represents 15% of total production, it's up 62% year-over-year. We're showing great success. Look at our digital users. We got lots of mobile momentum. We're up 19% year-over-year, we're doing a good job with the momentum there. If you look at the things that they're using from the digital capabilities perspective, look at our mobile check deposit activity. It's up 40% over last year because we're listening to clients and we're iteratively making it better. They wanted to make the ability to take the check better, we fixed that. They wanted to make sure that they have better availability, we fixed that.
They had some questions around limits, we fixed that. That's how you get 40% year-over-year growth. Look at the accolades we're getting. From our app perspective, we have a 4.8 on our mobile app on the Apple. That's fantastic. We're number 1. We're best in class. If you look at Android, we have a 4.5. We broke into the top 3. Again, best one of the top 3 in class, and then some other ratings here that show that we have one of the best digital platforms in the world. If you look at digital as a line of business or revenue, trying to see the impact on your overall business, here are some statistics that we look at and that we track. From a visit perspective, is marketing really paying off? How many visitors are you getting?
We got 143 million visitors to our website, which is phenomenal. 11% of that represents prospects. Those are your opportunities. You continue to get better at conversion, that's your real big opportunity to create more success. You move over to the middle pie chart, say what success are you having? If you look at our net new performance, I know earlier we shared our net new performance with you say, what's contributing to that net new? 47.3% of all our net new accounts had a digital acquisition. If you look at just breakout retail, 56% of our retail net new were through digital acquisition. Then commercial, 20%, which is really strong when you think about the commercial business now following the retail business. Look at what type of success we're having on a CAGR perspective. We've grown at 16.6% over the last three years.
If you exclude mortgage, our year-to-date, year-over-year growth is 18%. We're getting strong metrics and performance from the investments we're making from a digital revenue perspective. This slide right here just really shows you all the things that we're doing. It's so important to make sure you're active as it relates to digital transformation, you're making the right investment. These things that have already been listed or that are in flight. What's really important about here is not how much you're spending and how many things you're doing, but are you doing the right things that can make a difference for your client and to drive the business? It's a good little story that I like to think about when I think about how do we compete against maybe larger competitors that are announcing their big investments, it's a story about David and Goliath.
You had David. Saul wanted to have David put on his armor. David said, "No, I don't wear that. I got to use what I'm used to be able to win." He took five stones and a slingshot, but only took one of those stones. He was able to win. It's not about how much you're doing, but are you doing the right thing? Do you have the right stones and the right approach to making your business successful? That's what we're focused on. This represents that and how we're supporting the business. I want to thank you for listening today. The key takeaways here again, that we're creating client distinction by being client-centric. We're inspired by the Voice of the Client and all the data that we're able to take from being rich to being wealthy.
We're also empowered by dynamic technology, and we're growing our digital revenue and our digital account acquisition. Thank you all for listening. I'm going to turn it over to Clarke Starnes.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for participating in our conference today. If I can just move here. We're very proud historically of our risk program at BB&T. Four key areas I want you to focus on today. Number 1, that we have historically consistently produced best-in-class risk-adjusted returns. As we look forward in the future, though, there are structural industry innovation issues that are creating new and unique risks that we have to give due consideration to. We are adapting our risk and control programs to take advantage and embrace that opportunity in a safe and sound manner. In today's environment, credit risk is always important. BB&T is going to continue to maintain our conservative through-the-cycle approach to risk-taking with an intense focus on diversification and granularity.
I want to talk to you a little bit about our fundamental approach to risk management and how we view risk appetite. There are three key elements I want to focus on. One is a through-the-cycle perspective. I'm sure you hear that a lot, and it means different things to different people. I think for some people, it means I lend to the market through the cycle, and markets can change in their wide degree of risk acceptance. For us, it means trying to create a diversified business operation that is less sensitive to swings in the economy. For us, what we're really trying to do is to create a mix of businesses that have low relative variability and much higher relative resiliency under stress, no matter what the cycle is.
We know to be able to do that, you've got to be intensely focused on diversification, and we have an intentional bias toward granularity in really all aspects of our business operations. What that's yielded for us is some really strong results I've charted for you here. Lower relative non-accruals in our credit book, but also something we don't talk as much about, but is highly relevant in this new world, is our ops losses. We have some of the lowest op losses in the entire industry. You can see this in the ABA Ops Loss Consortium data. Again, a very low operational risk profile, which again, a lot of new operational risks are coming out of this digital innovation. This is my favorite slide for you all. I think this is the most objective scorecard of our cumulative risk positioning.
This looks at the most recent DFAST results. What I've charted for you is our net PPNR over baseline losses relative to our net stress losses over baseline. This is in the severely adverse scenario. I'll just show you, we have the best risk return positioning in the peer group, and we're the only bank in our peer group who's been in the northwest quadrant, as I like to tell our folks, for every CCAR cycle since it started. Again, that's the level of consistency we're trying to produce, and this is, I think, in a very objective way to look at it. We want to continue those great results, though, and still embrace innovation and all the great business opportunities you heard my colleagues talk about today.
We have to be mindful that this fast-paced environment that we're in does present new and unique risk considerations, particularly a lot of non-financial risks on the operational compliance, strategic, and reputational sides. Obviously, we're not avoiding those changes. We want to embrace that in our disrupt or die strategy, but we have to make sure that we have a good risk and control system to take advantage of these opportunities in a safe and sound manner. We have to think about our risk programs differently. If you really fundamentally pull back and think about most traditional risk and control frameworks, they've been highly linear in nature, very gated, almost a waterfall approach.
It's not necessarily very agile or client friendly, may have been effective in the old world, not going to be so effective if you're trying to be innovative and react to client demands in this new world we live in. We have to think about how can we reposition our risk controls in a manner that is different. Some of the things that we are doing and thinking about, for example, is thinking about embedding our risk design and risk controls earlier in the process. For example, embedding in things like agile sprints, reusable risk and control utilities that have already been standardized, they've been audited, they've been validated, tested, that we can reuse those in different types of products, not just a customized solution in every case. We've got to use different sorts of surveillance and real-time monitoring tools.
I'm going to give you a great example I'm very proud of today. Our first fintech investment was with a company called Enigma. It's a very sophisticated data aggregation utility. We've been able to take that and co-develop a data aggregation and surveillance program in our AML world that's going to substantially improve those traditional rules-based programs you see out there today using much greater usage of our various data sets. We've combined that, I think Rohan showed that to you out at one of the kiosks. We've combined that with an RPA solution that will substantially improve the efficiency of the workflow around working all of those alerts. That's an example of something we can do today we could not do a year or two ago. The neat thing about it is we can reuse that approach in many other applications as well.
It's reusable across many different dimensions. What we're really trying to do is be more insightful and strategic as we think about risk and enable the business transformation that we have laid out for you well in these other presentations. Again, we don't want to fool ourselves. You have to think about new and unique risks, and the risks may manifest themselves differently in today's world than you've historically experienced. I've kind of laid out a number of the things that we're seeing out there that we are considering, but we have to think about particularly the level of operational compliance, privacy risk, et cetera, that comes up, and then we've got to make sure that we adapt our risk and control components to address those. Many of these risks, you may actually create more risk by trying to solve another risk.
You may be trying to reduce fraud through an authentication profile, but you find out that that authentication profile is discriminatory and creates compliance risks. How do you deal with that? You've got to understand those relationships and avoid unintended consequences. I just want to peruse through and give you a few things that we're focused on right now I'm real excited about. First, really prevalent in all of these areas of innovation are two key risks. This would be thematic issues for the entire industry you've really got to be focused on. One is just overall, you need a comprehensive and sophisticated change management protocol, but just because of the speed and pace of the things that you're doing. Historically, again, slow in nature. We've got to move faster, but there are a lot of things going on at once as well.
We've also got to have to think about aggregate change risk. Many of these other initiatives I've mentioned involve third and fourth parties to a degree never seen before. We don't develop all of our solutions, so there's a number of innovative non-bank companies that we all partner with. They operate in the public cloud. There is a heavy use of APIs. A number of considerations that you have to really think about. A couple of things that we are doing that I think are serving us well, we are actively participating in some co-development of some shared utilities through the industry around third-party vendor management.
We think that will create some industry certification standards that we don't have today, will enable the banks to come together and more efficiently and effectively get to market with some solutions that will be more difficult for us to do on our own. Barbara did a great job and the others that have spoken before me around the innovation around digital and technology. Certainly at the forefront in everyone's mind has been the security or the cyber side, but I would tell you as a CRO, I'm very concerned about technology risk and aggregate being one of the big new risks that you really got to get your hands around. It's far beyond just InfoSec. It looks at some of the things Barbara talked about around application stability and availability, cyber resiliency, data protection and privacy, and how all of those things fit together.
One of the things that we are doing, many others very similarly, but we can't just depend on Barbara's group to do that by herself. Historically, technology risk has principally been under the CIO or the CISO in the technology group, but we've actually elevated a very strong independent risk function in the second line of defense in my world. These are staffed by former CIOs, CISOs, CTO people with those kind of pedigrees that come in and help us oversee the rapid programs that Barbara's putting into place and provide appropriate effective challenge and oversight and reporting. I'm very excited. We just hired our first CTRO, and he's on board today and doing a fantastic job. The other thing, you also have to think about the convergence that's occurring.
For example, in our financial crimes program, it has historically been around money laundering and then had separate programs around basic fraud. You also have things like security alerts going off in Barbara's CTOC center on the cybersecurity side. Many times the bad actors are trying to get through any way they can. You may be triggering multiple alerts in disparate parts of the bank. We're trying to think about how we can bring all that together, either physically through common platforms or decisioning tools or through virtualization. What we're trying to do is create a more integrated view of the financial crimes risk that's out there, and it's very prevalent in the new applications in the digital world. Also, compliance and privacy, that's historically been a very manual audit-like function. That will not work in today's world.
There are new heightened areas of consideration around privacy and compliance that are actually originating out of these new applications. We have to think about that differently, much more constant surveillance and monitoring. We're putting in a brand-new integrated GRC tool to help us utilize much more robust data monitoring, quantitative modeling, and things like common risk taxonomy. It allows you to really unleash the power of the data and manage compliance risk in a much better way. Final thing I want to talk about from a risk and control area, though, really goes back to our culture, and Kelly really hammered that hard yesterday, as he should have. It's great to innovate, you can put all the risk and controls you want to, but you can't control it all. I don't care how much automation you have.
At the end of the day, we have 36,000 employees that we have to depend upon to execute our processes and serve our clients and take care of all of our stakeholders. You cannot do that if you don't have a strong corporate culture. For us, having just absolute passion for ethics and corporate behavior is really, really important, and what comes out of that is a very, very strong risk culture. I sleep very well at night because I have 33,000 associates assisting us in risk management. Couple of things that we are doing new that I think are enhancing all of this. We have a program, I didn't put it on here, that we call Voice of the Associate. Kelly asked me to implement the last couple of years.
I personally chair a call every quarter with all levels of associates in the company on an anonymous basis to really get at, do you have real concerns about risk issues, behavioral issues, ethics events? Are you comfortable escalating to management? We want to know what's going on all the way down into the company. It's been a very valuable process, and frankly, it's done nothing more than reinforce to me how strong our culture is. Another thing we've recently done is we've elevated to the highest level a new culture and conduct risk committee. That's made up of most of the members of executive management. Again, the whole idea is to bring together the various programs we have around ethics and behavior so that we can make sure that we never have any unintended consequences, no matter how large that we grow.
I would just leave you with this. While it may be self-evident that that lowers things like compliance and reputational risk, frankly, just lowers risk overall. If you have a strong culture, you're going to have people doing the right thing. What I want to spend the remaining amount of my time on is certainly a timely topic around credit risk and our approach to lending, which has always been disciplined, relatively conservative, but mostly very consistent. Obviously, I've laid out the elements that are foundational to our lending approach around client selection, around just very strong transactional-based underwriting, and then very disciplined portfolio and servicing. I want to give you a couple of thoughts around credit, where we are in the market. We've always had consistent performance.
I've laid out for you some data you certainly could get yourself, but this looks at our results over the last 30 years or so. Certainly, we've outperformed on a risk-adjusted basis, both from a loss taking and a return standpoint. What's really interesting is, throughout the cycle, we will still outperform, but obviously, as you get potentially later in the stages of a cycle, you see a lot more convergence. We're at the all-time tightest level of there's very little differentiation in credit results right now. I would remind you that the gray shading is the distribution of the results among the peers. You can still see while the averages may not tell the whole story, you can see there's a wide degree of performance really in a year, and particularly as things turn, it gets much wider.
We're very mindful that while we're not calling any sort of late stage cycle necessarily now, we do see a lot of behavior out there in underwriting and risk selection that just feels very characteristic of late stage cycle dynamics, and we've listed some of those there. Obviously, everybody's performance looks similar. There's an obsessive focus on revenue and growth. You don't hear a lot of talk about quality, and you certainly are seeing loosening underwriting standards. Obviously, we're mindful of that. For BB&T, the main message I want to give you is we don't go through risk on and risk off periods. We're Always On. We're always focused on being consistent, whatever the cycle is. One of the ways we do that is a real obsession around diversification.
One of the things that Kelly and I put in when we came in our roles was a rolling comprehensive 5-year target portfolio mix process. We have a lot of work that goes into this around stress testing and performance review, where we try to model what we think is an aspirational portfolio mix that we can lend into given the market opportunities. What you can see is substantial diversification since the Great Recession. We're very close to where we think an ideal target mix would be. Again, what drives us is the goal toward lower variability, higher resiliency. For us, that looks like a conscious effort over the years to reduce our relative CRE and ADC and resi mortgage concentrations and move toward a more granular C&I and non-real estate consumer. We're making great progress there. We think it'll yield excellent results.
One of the ways that we drive that is through a very strong limits framework. We have a myriad of ways that we segment the portfolio, both commercial and retail, and also a very intense focus on granularity through our single borrower and our single project or the individual limit considerations. One of the things I thought would be helpful today, we have to give you a little bit more color under the covers of what's in our portfolio. We get a lot of questions about that, and we certainly disclose a lot, but give you guys a few tidbits today we don't normally disclose. Remind you all, our portfolio's $146 billion today. It's intentionally diversified between commercial and retail. The takeaway here is even within commercial and retail, there's a lot of diversification, whether it's in C&I, CRE, or on the retail side.
Then geographically, with the complement of national businesses we have, particularly in the non-real estate consumer, we're much more than a Southeast and Mid-Atlantic loan portfolio today. That geographic diversification, I think, will serve us well as we look forward. I thought I'd dive down just a little bit in the C&I side, $62.5 billion. You can see no single sector concentration intentionally focused on diversification. A couple of things I'm quite proud of that I think are differentiated characteristics. We have a very conservative portfolio. Our average loan size in our C&I book's less than $1 million. Our SNC book is less than 10% of our total loan portfolio. Our top 20 relationship commitments are less than 35% of tangible common equity. I would ask you to go back and see if anyone else is anywhere near that.
I think we look really good from a concentration level. I've listed out some of the things that we avoid. Very minimal exposure to leverage finance. You can see things like second liens, term Bs, bridge financing, full underwriting. We just don't do those things in general. I think, again, our C&I book's very diversified, very conservative. Similar on the CRE side. Average loan is under $2 million. Our largest single CRE credit's only $70 million. We just don't take big project risk or large, significant exposures. We're very diversified by the various MSAs. Another thing that we do is very intentional about governing down CRE exposure limits. It's governed down from what we would do on the C&I side and further limited by project type. Almost no exposures on the mall side. I know that's probably a question you all have.
Our loan sizing is more conservative. We use the stress cash flow coverage, which creates higher debt yield requirements than most of our peers. We end up sizing our loans more conservatively to stress for interest rate shock. Auto finance, I get a lot of questions about Regional Acceptance. I thought I'd give you a little color there. Regional has been a strong performer for us for a number of years. We've learned the business the hard way. We have very sophisticated analytics, but more importantly, we combine that with very strong risk controls around the operational verifications and collateral assessments. You really need to do that in the non-prime side. I've just put some history here to show you that it's interesting. These types of businesses tend to stress a little earlier, but they recover really quickly.
We actually had some of the best performance we've ever had at Regional coming through the crisis as a lot of prime borrowers fell down. We're actually producing lower losses today substantially than a year ago. We feel well-positioned no matter what the cycle will be. This is a business we understand very well, but we're also not greedy about the exposure levels. We keep a pretty tight limit on how much we will do even here, even though it's very attractive margins. Resi mortgage and home equity or DRL, very conservative. You can see that. We hold conforming loans, and we do jumbos for our wealth strategy. There's no particular concentrations there. Very minimal pre-crisis exposure on the DRL side. This is all in the branch direct originated credits in Brant's world. Very clean underwriting.
We also have a fast-growing wealth lending segment that Rufus mentioned. Again, very attractive. Again, resi mortgage in our consumer book looks very good. I would mention, I'll talk about this in a moment, we are not participating today in any sort of third-party unsecured lending platforms. We certainly are evaluating those, but we want to focus our consumer opportunities in cycle-tested businesses that we think have more attractive returns. Our card side, really, we're selling cards to our clients. This is a tidbit I'm very proud of. 70% of our bank card clients have four or more services. They are our clients. We're not doing any subprime or mass solicitation. It's a really conservative book. Now it's growing fast with new product opportunities. This is a huge competitive advantage here for us.
We worked for 20 or 25 years to make investments in a number of national prime-based specialty finance platforms. Let me say that again. These are not subprime platforms. These are prime-based, primarily small-ticket, secured finance platforms, and I've listed those out. I know Rufus and Chris and Brant went over a lot of those. I think the main takeaway for you all, highly diversified sets of proven, cycle-tested business models. We would rather spend our time growing these methodically and deliberately than spending our time investing in unsecured lending right now. Finally, I just want to end here. How do we look forward? What you can count on from BB&T is to maintain that consistent discipline through the cycle approach to credit risk management. We don't get in and out of lending.
We're steady through the cycle, but we've also proven to you that because of all the diversified investments we've made, we have plenty of growth opportunities even with that approach. Where we're spending more of our time, however, to what you heard earlier, is how can we make the operational and client onboarding processes more efficient and a better user experience. Lots of good investments there. All of those also come with them new and improved risk controls. I've said it before, our investment bias right now on the lending side are proven through the cycle platforms. We think we're in a lot of nice businesses, and very careful and deliberate evaluation of alternative credit delivery and origination platforms. I think you will see us be very careful about jumping in too fast and too hard, particularly as this credit cycle goes forward in a longer fashion.
Again, risk management is more critical than ever, and I feel very, very good about our historical performance and our opportunities ahead. Thank you very much, and I'll now bring in Daryl.
Every time I walk into this building, I see a big building with a lot of associates in it. What I really see is the LED lighting and 25% lower utility bill. I want to thank all of you for coming here to Greensboro. I know you took time out of your day and your week to come here, and I hope you found this to be very helpful. We're almost done. After me, we're going to have a short break, and then Kelly's going to come up, and we're going to do Q&A. I'm going to try to close this up and maybe try to pick up a little bit of time. What we're trying to do, my key takeaways are trying to grow organically through geography and diversification, delivering top-tier quartile profitability, also using optimal capital management, and using best-in-class shareholder returns.
You've heard a lot of things about associates, culture, and business strategy today. All those elements work well together at BB&T, such that we provide the best return to shareholders in the sector. We have a strong history of consistent performance. To produce leading and sustainable returns to shareholders, we've grown our business within our risk appetites, driven by diversified, strong market share across businesses and markets. We've done it through leading profitability, and we've managed it through capital formation and in the best interest of our shareholders. Organic growth is our top priority. As you have heard from everyone today, we are growing our client base quite well. We are very well-positioned in the markets we serve with leading market share and strong local presence. Our markets are smaller on average than our peers. We like that. Our community banking model works really good in these markets.
We're localized. The client loyalty factor is stronger. Chris showed you earlier our footprint on average is growing faster than our peers, which provides a great opportunity for us to grow the business. We like the diversity of the markets. David went over this earlier. Texas, Carolinas, and Florida are growing much faster, while Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia are growing slower. Actually, West Virginia is one of our most profitable markets. We have found success in each market. We like the balance. Again, organic growth is a top priority for us. As Clarke said, we won't sacrifice our well-defined credit discipline that has served us well for many decades. We don't try to time cycles. We stick to our risk parameters. It's just our culture. Our markets are a great backdrop to support the organic growth. It's also the diversity of our business.
Brant, David, Rufus, and John told you a lot about their businesses today. When you put them together, you create great synergies, diversification that drives consistent and prudent growth. As Chris went over, we operate in a 15-state branch footprint complemented by many national businesses. We are a balance between spread and fee income. We have a loan portfolio that's about half commercial and half retail, with sectors and geographies that are spread out and diverse. As Rufus said, our wealth management business has significant upside. As John said, our insurance business brokerage is a pure fee income business, an advisory business that takes no underwriting risk. It has been core to BB&T for many decades. Insurance has been set up to cross-sell with our bank clients and with its own business. It is also balanced 50% retail and 50% wholesale. Stress tests very well with CCAR.
As John said, the public markets attribute a very high valuation to insurance brokers for good reason. They have very strong cash flows with limited capital use. In this case, very synergistic with the rest of our businesses. Diversity of our business has contributed to leading performance historically and will continue to do so going forward. You heard from Clarke today about our risk culture. It's a culture that has resulted from our outperformance for a long time. Our business model has resulted in relatively granular loan portfolio versus peers. A much greater percentage of our commercial loans are smaller exposures. You can see this in the last Moody's report that shows us second out of 67 banks that participated in the survey. We do not take large positions just to grow our loan percentages. We are community bank-driven. We don't compromise on our standards.
Lastly, Gerard's ratio, the Texas Ratio, recognizes the success of our risk culture. We've always been and remain focused at achieving best-in-class shareholder returns. As Chris showed you earlier, we have industry-leading return metrics and are focused at maintaining competitive position through a variety of economic backdrops. Our net interest margin benefits from balance sheet mix and diversity. More so, the stability of our net interest margin relative to peers illustrates our balanced approach. We are focused at growing earnings consistently through different cycles, not when rates are moving in one direction. Half of our loan book is fixed, the other half is floating. We use a prudent use of derivatives to manage the position. Our strong return metrics are the result of many items we discussed and will discuss further. These are leading industry returns across cycles and are clear driver for top-tier profitability.
The continued focus on solid expense management has driven strong shareholder returns. We have generated positive operating leverage each quarter this year and have committed to maintaining that discipline in 2019 and beyond. Our strong culture of expense management has led to ratios that continue to trend downward meaningfully below peers. We have managed to do this without compromising BB&T's client experience. As Dontá showed you, our NPS ratio is moving up. Chris showed you earlier that we have many programs going on to drive efficiency and enhance revenue. You heard from John, Brant, David, and Barbara show you how they are transforming their businesses, improving margins, and having better efficiency and productivity. BB&T has financial flexibility to make the necessary investments in the new bank, we are confident we will lead to improving overall shareholder returns. Our funding base is a key competitive advantage for us.
We have transformed the right-hand side of the balance sheet materially over the last 10 years. When I joined the company almost 11 years ago, we were in last place in our peer group as DDAs a % of total deposits. We are now approaching the top quartile. This is attributable to the hard work of Donna, who used to run deposits and now is our Treasurer, as well as Rufus, Brant, and David to create products and grow relationships. On average, BB&T clients have had their account with us 10 years on the retail side and eight years on the commercial side. Looking back post-bank acquisitions, DDA growth has been positive for us while negative for peers. As you've heard from others, we're focused at providing the best client experience for them while providing convenience, which leads to long-term relationships.
Our strong credit metrics profitability combined with diversified business markets, plus capital and liquidity and great performance over many economic cycles have been well received by the rating agencies. BB&T has some of the highest long-term ratings in the sector. These ratings help reduce funding costs, maintain strong deposit relationships, and enhance profitability. While our top priority is strong, growing core deposit base, we continue to have a presence in the corporate debt markets. The charts on this slide illustrate the strong performance of BB&T and the compression of our debt levels versus similarly rated peers. Fixed income investors have awarded us with strong debt spreads as they recognize the strength and profitability of BB&T. Optimizing capital has always been a priority for BB&T, we will continue to hold the right amount of capital relative to our risk appetite.
Peer levels have come down over the last several years while we have maintained ours at a constant level while maintaining industry-leading returns. As you know, our performance through 2008 stress testing was very positive, representative of a strong and resilient PPNR aided by our insurance brokerage business and diverse and granular credit portfolio. As you have heard from Kelly, organic growth is our top priority. We have been clear on our priorities. Second is strong dividend payout, and last is share buybacks and strategic opportunities. Our capital levels are adequate to support and drive organic growth. We have always paid a strong dividend, and we have every intention to maintain a payout in the 40%-50% of earnings. Share buybacks and strategic opportunities have helped drive earnings per share growth and will support organic growth and dividends to produce consistent, strong overall returns.
We expect that these strategies will produce 8%-12% annualized returns to shareholders. As you have likely seen, the Fed recently proposed changes to our regulatory framework. There still has to be work done before these changes are finalized, but we view these as very positive. We believe, if enacted, that these changes will be positive for BB&T and for the sector in general. The benefits for us are meaningful when we cross over $250 billion in assets. Cost avoidance by not having to implement the advanced approach is really big. AOCI relief will free up capital that can be used in the third bucket for buybacks and strategic opportunities.
We're not sure yet how CCAR 2019 will be structured or whether we'll be part of the stress test process, but we plan to have an aggressive share buyback. Given our LCR ratio is approximately 130, we plan to bring it down approximately to 115 over the next year or so. The plans to do this will be by not reinvesting cash flows, which will help fund loan growth and take pressure off of deposit betas. This will increase net interest margin and will also grow net interest income with a relatively flat balance sheet. Incremental share repurchases will be about $1 billion more than what you would typically see out of us over a CCAR year, resulting in solid shareholder returns. Lastly, Donna and I believe that this strategy will be much more efficient and a much more profitable balance sheet.
BB&T shareholders have received a compelling total shareholder return over the long run. The chart on the right shows our performance since pre-crisis, which oddly compares quite favorably. Many of you in the room and listening have owned our shares over this period and have experienced the appreciation. We thank you for your support. The earnings profile of our company has allowed us to build tangible book per share at a faster rate than peers while maintaining a strong return on capital to shareholders. As we turn the page to 2019, we are optimistic on the economy and the landscape that we believe will translate into another solid year for BB&T. Our outlook for 2019 is based on a few conservative assumptions, which are outlined on the left-hand side of the page. We expect the balance sheet and revenue growth to be in the 2%-4% range.
Credit will continue to be relatively benign and estimate 30 to 50 basis points in net charge-offs. We expect expenses to be flat at $6.8 billion, excluding merger and restructuring charges for a third year in a row, which will provide another year of positive operating leverage. We believe that these are realistic numbers that we can achieve, and we are already in the midst of executing on this plan. The last slide brings it all together. As we think about our long-term targets, the message is clear. We have delivered our goals across the cycles and expect to continue to do so. Our outlook has improved for profitability metrics since our last Investor Day. We expect a 12%-15% return on equity, 19%-20% return on tangible equity, and a 1.4 to 1.7 return on assets are best in class.
Charge-offs to normalize in 40 to 60 basis points range. We expect to achieve returns generating 3%-5% revenue growth, consistently maintaining positive operating leverage. We are planning to target a CET1 ratio of 9.5 to 9.75. In summary, we are very excited about the outlook and our ability to deliver on these targets. The takeaways from this is we are continuing to grow organic growth through revenue and geography and diversification, delivering top-tier profitability, optimizing capital, producing best-in-class returns. Given I have about five minutes left. Oh, no. Here we go. I had to take a few minutes to talk about CECL. First, BB&T is on track to implement the standard as required in 2020. We are testing our models and need to finalize certain assumptions that are inputs to the model, but we are on track to go into parallel in mid-2019.
As we have built the models, test results show that CECL is more procyclical than the current method used today. These models have been built for stress testing and modified for CECL and are the most scrutinized models. Our stress testing models have hundreds of pages of documentation that have been reviewed by second line, third line, regulators, and auditors. Preliminary tests show that these models are fit for purpose and have been back tested using historical information. When CECL was first approved, it was more of an academic review, and the studies assumed perfect foresight in the economy. The BPI study that was recently issued mirrors how the models actually work in the CECL environment. In a benign environment, you can see that the total reserves are about the same. However, the commercial reserves are much lower while the consumer reserves are much higher.
In an adverse environment, you can really see the procyclicality of the reserves. The residential mortgage reserves are up three and a half times, and the consumer reserves are approximately double. This creates large earnings volatility, depletes capital, and establishes a strong disincentive to lend in the stressed economic environment. Moody's Analytics is a very good economic forecasting group. However, it is impossible to truly predict the future. As you can see, in 2007 and 2008, Moody's did not call for the recession. As the recession played out, they continued to underestimate the magnitude. However, just when the recession was bottoming was when they threw in the towel and the recession was going to get worse. You can see the impact on the residential mortgage portfolio. As we have discussed, these are quantitative results with no qualitative adjustments. However, you have to remember what was going on in 2009.
You had JPMorgan saving Bear Stearns, Washington Mutual. You had Wells saving Wachovia, PNC saving National City, and Lehman failing. I ask you, what regulator is going to allow you to adjust your model results downward with a qualitative adjustment? Coincidentally, in August of 2009, BB&T was successful in winning a competitive bid from the FDIC of Colonial. We priced the loan book at a 37% discount. After many years, the economy improved and actual losses came in closer to the low 20s. This is another example of how markets overreact in economic stress. Because the economics of lending has been detached from the accounting, it makes it harder for banks to lend to small businesses and non-prime clients. The slide shows you an example of our subprime auto portfolio, where we book reserves now that we expect to have in one year.
What can we do about this? All banks have sent in letters for a pause and a study of the procyclicality. The Fed can easily adapt stress testing models for CECL, and we expect to produce similar results. Also, 21 banks have sent in to FASB recently a CECL alternative that builds on its strengths but addresses regional banks' largest concerns. It's a three-bucket approach where bad loans and one year of losses from the good loans will be booked into income, with the rest being booked in OCI. This fits nicely with the Fed's NPR on capital that basically backs out OCI for regulatory capital.
This significantly reduces the income volatility associated with CECL and approaches and aligns better with the international standards. Investors will have the visibility in the potential losses of this loan book. BB&T supports this approach. We thought it was important for you to show what we're seeing as we roll out CECL and the potential impact on the capital in the system. Let me wrap it up. To wrap it up, you heard today the vision for the future and why we are so confident we can continue to build our success and deliver top-tier returns across the cycle. Our goals remain simple and unchanged for decades. We will grow the company prudently. We will do so with leading profitability, and we'll manage our capital to help continue to drive shareholder returns across the cycles.
Before I turn it back to Rich, I just want to thank some people that basically put on this Investor Day. As you know, doing this is a huge effort. First people I'd like to thank is Alan and Rich, who run investor relations. The effort and the leadership that they put in on this was really big. Also part of their team, there's Christina Sherrell, who's here somewhere. She does all the presentations, and I will tell you a story. We got all these presentations about a month ago, and they were great presentations, but they were all great individual presentations. She spent the last month putting it all together, making them all look alike and flow together. I give her great effort and gratitude for what she did there. Others in IR that helped out were Richard, Carla, and Jonathan.
In IT to help get everything working for this day, Ken Daniels and April Starling. As we were putting all the presentations together, we were meeting in the evenings about every other day for about three weeks. My team that's sitting up here in the back. Our corporate controller, Cindy, and Hank Sturkey, our assistant controller. Dale Davies, who's in corporate finance, and Aaron Ritter, and then Hope Dziuchowski. Hope got the job of actually going back to each of these executive managers saying, "We're changing it here," or, "We want to do this over here," and did a great job. The executive managers got a little tired of Hope, but I think it all worked out okay. The last group I want to tell you that really helped us out is not a BB&T group.
It's somebody that I've worked with for 25 years, and it's basically a banking team. They're here today. Over there is Vinnie Badinehal and Jason Braunstein , and their team is Eric and Sabrina. They really helped us work and pull this together. They're just part of our team, and want to thank you for all their efforts in pulling this off. With that, I will turn it back to Rich.
Thank you, Daryl. Just a reminder, I did get a question earlier. We're going to have the shuttles leave at 3:15, one for the airport and one for the Leadership Institute. I had a question about what that shuttle going to Leadership Institute, what time it would get to the airport. Think about 4:00 to 4:15, but maybe plan on 4:15 in case you have flights that are leaving shortly after 5:00. We're going to take a break now, and we're going to start back promptly at 2:30 with the Q&A session with executive management. Thank you.
Let's get started. You've been very patient. It's not working? Our first question. Okay, good. Before you get to the first question, I want to recognize Tina Fuller, wherever she is. She's been the event planner, and she's done a lot of this work. Tina, thank you so much. We have our first question.
Thanks very much. Jeff Elliot, Autonomous Research. You've got this news about the 250 billion threshold very likely going away, assuming the NPR proceeds as proposed. You've also talked quite a lot about the investments you're making in technology. It kind of feels, if you take those two together, you've got a regulatory environment that supports acquisitions, and you've got investments which can be scaled over a bigger asset base. You sounded a little bit more downbeat on M&A on the most recent calls. How do we square those things together, and how do we think about the inorganic growth strategy?
Yeah. You've heard all day today my associates talk about a variety of really, really good and, I think, very exciting strategic organic growth plans. Most of the technological investments you've heard about are either to make the back room more efficient, more effective, or enable the front room, the new bank, as we talk about it, the new digital strategies. All of that is supporting organic growth. As I have said repeatedly, we are laser-focused on organic growth. We have made major investments on behalf of our shareholders over the last several years to prepare us to get really good returns off of those investments, and we frankly think it's time for us to generate returns off of those investments for our shareholders. We are laser-focused on organic growth.
I hope you heard that very clearly from our team today, and that's where our focus is. Yes.
Mike Mayo with Wells Fargo Securities. Thank you for the day. In Boston last week, we heard about 15 bank presentations. This might be about the fifth investor day many of us have been to this year. Some of what we've heard seems really different, but some of it doesn't seem as different than some other banks. You're saying you're a different bank. We've heard some examples. If we could just maybe go down the line, if you had to pick one aspect that you think where BB&T is really different, what's that one aspect that you'd highlight maybe in each of the different areas?
Just go right down the line. Okay.
For our difference, I would say it's really the culture that we have with management.
He can't hear.
I would say.
One differentiating factor is the management. We spoke last night to a couple investors, the team that we have here assembled, there's a lot of us that have worked together for a while. There's some younger ones, and we have good growth potential, we're all focused on trying to achieve the best thing for the company and the shareholder in the long run. Everybody is aligned for that one goal, and is really focused on that.
Yeah, that's obviously the first one always. I would say diversification. You asked me that last night, I said diversification. You said that's boring, and I said that's good. I would say diversification, it works in good and bad times.
I think from a risk management standpoint, the number one differentiator is the risk culture. We live and breathe a risk culture every day, and I think that's demonstrated in the results, and I'd put ours up against anyone's.
I will say the item I shared with you around the co-creation, having the 40 professionals, seven PhD, co-creating real time with our clients is making a meaningful difference. Allow us to make iterative changes in a more positive way.
I think from a branch network perspective, the way we go to market is differentiated. The integrated approach that comes through our community bank strategy that's been around for 30 years, where our retail branch teams are connected to all the other lines of business and support our clients in an integrated way, is a key differentiator.
I would say in our business, it's an unwavering commitment to evolve the business, to do the tough things, to move the business forward so that we can very productively serve the client in a very efficient way.
Mike, I think in the corporate institutional wealth businesses, we have never chased the market. We've never gone after the hot product. We've never gone after the stretch structure, that leaves us strategically positioned to really gain share because of credibility. Also, we're underweight. We are still underweight with the businesses that I represent. There's material growth opportunity out there for us in the marketplace.
As new to the financial division, I would agree it's really all about our culture.
Mike, I'd say it's our insurance business. No other bank in the United States has an insurance business anything like ours. We're the largest bank-owned insurance broker, and we're about 20 times the size of the second-largest bank-owned insurance broker.
You saw it on full display last night. Our Leadership Institute, it's a differentiator. We deliver that to our clients, and it's unique. We've been doing it for now four decades. You just can't turn that switch on. It's here to stay, and it's a real differentiator for BB&T.
Mike, I think it's a focus on execution and continuous improvement.
I would just add for our transformation in technology that we've been putting together, one of the things I talk to our associates about is if you ever seen the movie "The Greatest Showman," one of the songs in there is called "A Million Dreams." Really, the transformation and journey that we are on really came from the goals and hopes and dreams of our technology associates and what they actually want to do. It's really the power of the associates actually coming together with their dreams about how a technology organization should run to be able to deliver to these teams. So it's the million dreams of our associates coming together.
Mike, I'd say, as you heard already, it's the diversification. It's the risk culture that we've set for ourselves, the steady risk appetite that we've maintained for a long time, and really just sticking to that appetite.
Just follow up, Mike. Daryl had it right, and Donna, the culture is the difference. That's why we spent so much time last night. I get your point. A lot of the strategies that while they're new and different for us, a lot of other companies have a lot of the same strategies. I get your point. The real difference, other than the philosophy, the culture, at BB&T is about our, what we call integrated relationship management and our integrated leadership approach. This group of people meets every Monday for a number of hours, sometimes all day, integrating all of our strategies. It's ultimately about execution. Everybody can have great strategy concepts, but it's all about execution. At BB&T, because we're so tightly woven, we share everything all the time. The team gets along great.
It's all about execution, and that's about integrated relationship management to the client and the integrated leadership thinking at the corporate level. Yes.
Thanks. John Pancari, Evercore ISI. Just back to the M&A question. I know you said you're laser-focused organically, and what you spend here is positioning you better for that. In your mind, is there a change? Is that a change in how you think about M&A versus a year ago? Are you thinking now, given all this investment and given the investing you need to do and what technology is doing, that you just are not as interested in M&A as you were previously?
Just some perspective. M&A has been a part of our strategy for a long time. About three years or so ago, we did three mergers. I said at that time, we were going on a self-imposed pause. I have not released that pause. I have further explained that we are dramatically focused on organic growth. I've further said that, frankly, doing deals in today's environment is extraordinarily difficult, that the world has not caught up with the reality in terms of the economics of all the changes we have talked about. Number 1, we got a lot on our plate. Number 2, we laser focus on organic growth. Number 3, the economics are not very conducive to mergers anyway. Number 4, nothing has fundamentally changed. I've been saying the same thing follow along.
One follow-up on capital, if I could. On the CET1 target of 9.5%-9.75%, that previously was 10%. Is there opportunity to continue to push that lower? I know it's your updated long-term target, given the changing regulatory environment, can that go lower?
Our current CET1 is 10.2%, and we've kind of constant around there. We had said that was kind of our level. It was a very conservative level. What we talked about as we contemplate next year's CCAR, assuming we're into CCAR, but not our next year submission which we've not finalized, of course, as we head into the end of the year. We think there's 50-75 or so basis points that we can release relative to these changes given our very low-risk profile.
Hi, Ken Usdin from Jefferies. Just two expense questions. First is that Daryl, and maybe for Barbara as well, in the context of keeping expenses flat as you talked about, obviously savings and funding the investments, can you just help us understand how much is the investments growing versus what your kind of self-help is in terms of balancing that?
The way I would answer that is we are basically taking away expenses out of the old bank, whether it's in branches, we're consolidating back offices, reduction in force in individuals, utilities, whatever, and we are redeploying it into the new bank. That new bank includes digital, includes a lot of the projects that Barbara was talking about in IT and also includes some revenue enhancement, new products and services and all that stuff. Marketing as well, increasing our marketing budget. All that's boiled together. If you actually look at the IT budget, she's probably going to be flat to up but one of her transformations is really getting to be more productive.
Absolutely. There we go. Absolutely. One of the things that we're focused on when I talked about Lean process automation, and you think about the ability to take out or do additional work around 10%-15% additional work. You certainly can make choices about whether you take that cost out or whether you redeploy and do new initiatives. Again, our goal is to make sure that we are as efficient and effective as we can be. As we do that and free up dollars, we can look to see how we either reinvest that back into the technology part to support what the teams are doing, or if we need to reduce expenses, then we certainly can do that as well.
At least we have the financial flexibility with the activities that we're doing to reinvest in the way that's most appropriate for the company.
Thank you. Daryl, just my follow-up on that is you didn't give an explicit efficiency ratio target. You talked about positive operating leverage. I'm just wondering if you can just help us understand just what your general thought process of where efficiency should go in the future from the 57 and change.
If you look at 2019, we didn't give a specific efficiency number target but if we can grow the revenue in the 2%-4% range and keep expenses flat, we're going to be in the mid-50s. When you get out beyond 2019, how much efficiency and operating leverage you can get, it's probably not expenses flat, but it's basically maybe expenses growing 2% and revenue growing 3%-5%. Hopefully we can continue to improve upon that efficiency ratio.
Remember, when you're making comparisons to other institutions, there's a couple hundred basis points inflation in that, if you will, for insurance business, which is very profitable. If you think about where we are today, if you adjust for insurance, we're already in that 55 kind of level. If you adjust for insurance, what Daryl's saying is we could see ourselves going below mid-50s. A lot of that depends on the revenue. That's why the efficiency ratio, I know we all like to talk about it a lot, it's very tricky. Over the last several years, most of us have improved our efficiency ratio by controlling expenses with very meager revenue growth. If we go through a period with more normalized revenue growth, there's lots of potential.
Gerard Cassidy, RBC Capital Markets. Hi, Kelly.
Hey, Gerard.
Coming back to the differentiation question. You pointed out others have similar products as yourselves. We heard last week at the BAAB a lot of digital talk and data and all that stuff from many of your peers. Are you at a point yet where this differentiation will allow you to charge higher prices for products or pay lower rates on deposits? Or are we just not there yet where customers come to expect this type of service, but you really can't price up for it or benefit from it from a pricing standpoint? Have you been able to monetize it yet?
Well, yes, in some cases, and in some cases, no. One of the great challenges that banks have today is to pick the areas that they can really create true differentiation and where they really cannot. It's nice for everybody to say, "Look, all of our products are better than anybody else's." That's really not true. We can't out credit card JPMorgan or Capital One. We have a good credit card product array, but we can't say our credit cards are better than theirs. Where we can out-perform in terms of quality small business, medium-sized business. There are aspects of our corporate banking business, our wealth banking business. We have our insurance business. Yeah, we have a number of product areas which are truly unique and/or differentiatable, and we can get a price.
We do get a price advantage. There are some that are trickier because they are more commodity-like, and it's more difficult to get the price advantage.
Thank you.
Is that okay? Oh, hi.
Hey, Betsy.
Hi, Betsy Graseck from Morgan Stanley. Couple of questions. One, just a quick follow-up on the capital where you're taking out 50-70 basis points for long-term. Does it matter if the NPR goes through or not? If the NPR does go through, that happens, if it does not go through?
We really don't want to start lowering the capital ratio until we make sure that the rule is actually passed as it frees up the OCI capital. One thing that to be clear, I had a question between break on this is, if this year's CCAR was a normal CCAR cycle for us, our dividend payout was in the around 40% range, we had our share buyback. Our share buyback was $1.7, though we used approximately $300-$400 of it up on the insurance transaction. When I talked about in the presentation an additional $1 billion, it's equivalent to like having $2.7 in buyback when CCAR 2019 plays out as an approximation.
To be clear, because this is very confusing. In today's world, pre-NPR, pre-CECL, pre anything else, the minimum level of capital that we have to have is 7%. If you start from that and you say, "Well, we're pretty conservative. We'd like to have 150 basis points or so just to operate the business without," because if it's all below seven, bad things happen, like you have to cut your dividend and so forth. That gets you 8.5. You say, well, yeah, but you're right, and a half to 10.2 is a long way. Then right now we're having to hold back 100 basis points because of 250. You got questions about CECL, which may or may not impact that. We don't think it will.
You want to also think about how you feel about the economy and all the factors as you look forward. We factor all of that in. Today we've said we were comfortable in the 10-ish range. If you assume all of that stays the same, which it could change, but if it stays the same, that gets you down to that 9.5 or so level post NPR.
Got it. Okay. Just another question on the expense side. I think, John, you mentioned in your presentation on the insurance segment that you're interested in getting up that right-hand piece of the pie, the net profit. Maybe you could give us a little bit of a sense as to how much room there is there, what kind of timeframe we're talking about, and is that over and above the expense outlook, Daryl, that you have? Is insurance one of those levers, or does insurance stand alone? Maybe John could-
Yeah. Betsy, the guidance that I gave definitely includes and embeds what John is talking about. Everything that Barbara, Brant, David, everybody's doing with all these projects that Chris talked about is all embedded in the guidance that we gave. Obviously, John's operating margins are going to go up, which is part of that.
In terms of increasing the net income slice of the pie in the chart on the right, when I talk about our transformation and the 31+ initiatives that we have, they are all designed to do that through a combination of increasing efficiency, reducing expenses, improving organic growth. One of the ways that we went about the project was to look at our starting EBITDA margin. It is a common metric for insurance brokers, and we compared where we were to where our peers were, and we were lower than they were in terms of EBITDA margin. The plan that we put together was to get to a peer-ish EBITDA margin over a 3-year period of time. Our peers' EBITDA margins will also change, of course. They are all working on improving theirs. If you look at the improvement, it is significant.
I should probably, I imagine, stay away from exact numbers. I would say it is a pretty considerable profitability improvement.
Okay, thanks. Just one last one for Barbara. Maybe you could talk a little bit about some of the opportunities that you have for pulling back on some of the IT spend. I know that overall the budget is flat to up. We talked a lot about some of the investment spend that you are making in the platform. It would be helpful to understand where there are opportunities for IT to get more efficient.
The primary areas when you think about the spend that we have, we have about 40%-50% of our spend is in what we call labor spend, whether that be direct associate cost or contractors that are offshore. The key for us is making sure in those areas that we are being as efficient as we can, whether it is making sure what we call smart sourcing, whether we source from the right vendor at the right time. Also making sure that we are as efficient as we can across that large population of associates and how they do work. That is a large lever for us to make sure that we are most efficient at.
The other area I would say is when you look at the other portions of expense have to do with large contracts, large equipment that we have to do, making sure that our contracts and relationships that we have with vendors, whether it be software or hardware, that we are optimizing that spend as well and being very considerate of the length of terms of contracts and the cost associated with those large spend that we have in the infrastructure space.
Lana.
Thank you. Lana Chan from BMO Capital Markets. Daryl, the revenue target that you gave for next year, 2019, does that embed higher rates, further rate hikes?
Good question, Lana. What we have in our forecast right now is that the Fed will move in December. Then we have a move, I think, in March or April, and then one in maybe September timeframe. Two moves in 2019.
Okay.
Curve moving up slightly, nothing too dramatically in that period.
Thank you. Does it embed the potential benefit from the LCR moving down?
It does. With us keeping the balance sheet relatively flat. If it works, see how it plays out, but as security cash flows pay off, if we put loans on, you're probably going to create 150-300 basis points higher yielding return on that marginal asset. That's really how we're going to get some relief on not having to fund, a little bit less deposit pressure, but also higher yields on your overall earning assets.
Thank you.
Matt O'Connor, Deutsche Bank. I wanted to ask about loan growth, I guess the crux of the question is, why are you not more optimistic on the loan growth outlook for 2%-4%? I guess the context I'll put it in is, on the one hand, I appreciate that you don't want to overpromise on loan growth when there's not much in the industry right now. On the other hand, as I heard from all your business line heads, there's a lot of initiatives underway to grow, whether it's large corporate, expand in auto, the marine. It seems like the runoff portfolio is largely done across the portfolio. You're in faster growth markets. You're more diversified. How do we reconcile what feels like it should be a bigger loan growth opportunity with the guidance, and maybe it's Clarke getting in the way.
Let me make a comment, and then some of my colleagues can fill in too. That cuts across a lot of the team. We're conservative. Our portfolio has been through an inflection point this year, as you alluded to, in the mortgage portfolio, in the auto portfolio. Even though you may have from trough to peak, you would have higher percentage growth rates. When you look at average to average, because those are going like this year that makes it difficult in terms of growth, even though it's stabilized. Mathematically, that's some of it. To be honest, we're still trying to figure out right now where we're going in the market with regard to these accelerated levels of payoffs that we've had. It's been pretty brutal for the last three quarters.
Once that stabilizes, which it will, if rates continue to drift up, at some point, those permanent type product goes out into the marketplace, you'll see higher growth rates. I think we're trying to be conservative and reflect the math of some of the changes in our portfolios. You're right, all these strategies you heard about are very bullish with regard to loan growth. Any comment?
The only thing I would say is the last two years, we've grown loans year-over-year, 2.4% two years ago. We'll be about 2% this year. If we get 3+% next year, that's over a 50% increase.
Hi. Saul Martinez, UBS. One of the themes of today is disrupt or die, and you've been speaking about that for a while. Can you talk a little bit more about what exactly you mean by disruption? Where you see the threats of disruption from both fintech and big tech as well? In everything you do as a bank, whether it's lending, facilitating payments, deposit products, where do you see the biggest threats of insurgents coming in and eating away at the economic value? Conversely, where do you see the opportunities to maybe partner with these players and to provide some of those technologies and capabilities at scale?
The threat is not coming as much specifically from an individual fintech or fintechs. It's coming from this conceptual change that I've described of real-time demand. The marketplace has moved to where they have a dramatic different expectation in terms of delivery of all products and services, and especially in the consumer space. In order to comply, we have to build this new bank. In order to build a new bank, we have to disrupt the old bank. It's not an immediate threat from any individual company. It's more of a conceptual understanding that the marketplace has changed, and it impacts delivery of all of our products and services.
I would say what we're trying to do is take a broad-based, foundational, conceptual approach to dismantling, disrupting, whatever term you want to use, building the new bank so that you have a really strong foundation for the future. To be honest, we're not particularly concerned about any individual fintech. I personally think that the fintechs have added some value to our industry, and that they've provided some stimulus in terms of focusing on times. On the other hand, if you ask me, am I particularly concerned about them inherently being our problem, I would say I'm a lot more concerned about other things than that.
Thanks. Chris Marinac with FIG Partners from Atlanta. You mentioned earlier today about the SNC portfolio having opportunity to grow, and it was roughly $50 million average size. Is that an incremental source of growth next year, or would that be more significant in terms of how we get to the 2%-4% growth?
Clarke?
Sure. I would say it is an incremental growth. As we up-tier, what our intent is just to increasingly become more important to the clients we already have and to introduce net new clients, which comes through our expansion strategies broadly nationally in our markets. As each, as the revolvers, as the structures come due, we are critically looking at where is the appropriate tiering level for us. You get an organic uplift out of those as well as adding net new clients. I would say it would be intentional.
We got time for one more question.
Oh, geez, pressure's on. Hey, guys. It's Jamie Hanna. I've been to one or two of these investor days, I just echo what Daryl said. Really well put together. I go to investor days for banks, payment networks, credit card companies, trust banks. This is one of the better investor days I've seen, so thank you for putting it together. The question for Kelly on culture, as you think about growing this bank from 1995, 36th largest by market cap, then you think about today, ninth largest bank. Over that time, where have there been challenges in keeping the culture consistent, and what are your learnings for the next 10 years?
Jamie, that's a really insightful question, we have learned some things. There is no doubt that as you get larger in terms of number of associates, more geographically widespread, continuing the culture becomes more challenging. The reason is this, continuing your culture and building a culture is about teaching beliefs. It's back to our leadership model of beliefs change behaviors create results. Culture is all about building a consistent array of beliefs that support what you're trying to accomplish. That's really about one-on-one and group type of interactions in terms of conveying what the belief is all about. There's a lot of scientific knowledge about actually changing beliefs. I actually did a thesis on it a long time ago, when you're changing someone's belief, it's actually about the consistent conveyance of credible information by a powerful source over a reasonable period of time.
Bottom line, I tell our associates, you have to preach and teach a lot. What we've learned is we've had to ramp up the amplitudes of our efforts in terms of making sure, because all of a sudden we look around and we say, we add 5,000 new associates every year. Just because we've got it in our blood, they're new to the company. We have built in indoctrination, cultural initiatives in the hiring process, the onboarding process. Last year, all of our executives spread out. We held, I'd say, like 60 or 70 events all around the country, several hour cultural events. I do a quarterly video that goes to every single associate where we talk about a lot of things, including the culture.
Next year, we're going to do a whole another round of cultural events all around the country where we'll again go over and over the culture. It's kind of like when you're raising your kids, you have to kind of keep telling them to do this and don't do that a lot. Changing beliefs in a company is no different. People ask me, can you do it as you get larger? The answer is absolutely, but you have to be really committed. The CEO and the executive team have to spend a lot of time, and then it filters down, and then you keep reinforcing. It's a really good question. We are out of time. I want to also thank you all for coming. You've been very patient and very nice. Most of you, I think all of you, have supported us for a long time.
We really appreciate it. What you've heard us say is that BB&T is a different bank. In fact, we're a different kind of company. We are a company that is really focused on accomplishing our why. Our why at BB&T is to make the world a better place to live. We're really serious about that. Now we know we make loans and deposits and get fees, and we know we need to make money. We know we need to get the stock price up and all of that. To be honest, that's not what we get excited about. What we get excited about is making the world a better place to live. In doing so, we end up accomplishing the objectives for all of the constituents that support our organization. We are a very values-driven organization. We're a very culture-driven organization.
That is the differentiator, as we responded earlier, in terms of BB&T. What you've heard today is our recognition that the world has changed. It has really changed big time, especially over the last three years or so. We believe it is necessary to respond to that change, and that change involves building effectively a new bank because the world now has real-time demand for satisfying their needs. That's why we've seen so many traditional retailers go by the wayside because new entrants have, in fact, created a new supply capability that they have not been willing or able to respond to. We are not going to die. We are going to disrupt. As one of my associates likes to say, Kelly says, "Disrupt to thrive." I kind of like that. That's really what we're doing. We're disrupting to thrive.
We believe all the strategies that you've heard from our team today are designed to do exactly that. I will tell you this also. I don't believe there's another executive management team in the banking industry, maybe not in hardly any company, that can compare with this group of folks. If you look at the relatively young age, if you look at the tenure with our company, if you look at the capabilities. Well, you saw it today, and I live with it every day. I'll just tell you, I am super proud of our team. Would you help me recognize them for doing a good job? Don't forget this, while BB&T is working hard to make the world a better place to live, so can you. We have a why, you have a why. You're not driftwood. You have a purpose. You can change the world.
As I said last night, my hope and prayer for all of you, for all of us, is that you get up every morning clear about your purpose. Know why you're here. Focus in on the concept of the power of one. Live today as if it's the only day you have, because it is. Don't worry about yesterday. Don't wait for tomorrow. Live today. Make all the contribution you can to this world. When you focus on individuals, treat them with the dignity and respect that they deserve. When you focus on every single interaction that you have with people, realize that every time you touch someone, you have the opportunity to make their lives better, and you never know where their lives will go because you have the power to change the world.